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Re: Friday, August 8, 2003
The snap comparison is that Rush Limbaugh, and all the broadcast giants are dinosaurs... large, significant, and declining. Blogs are mammals, small, agile, disorganised, but well-connected, and when the desire for coherence strikes them, like Flash Mobs ( http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10925 ), they can be very significant. The *star* bloggers are larger than all the rest, as Clay Shirky has pointed out, but so? It's not like the cost of entry is enough to keep out competitors, its only quality that keeps the top bloggers where they are. When they fall there's a thousand more to take their place. Despite the familiar Zipf distribution, its not as static as books in a library. Its not about a blogger becoming the next Rush Limbaugh, any more than the autombile was about becoming the next train. "Small Pieces, Loosely Joined." As you have pointed out, the mass market is harder to reach, fragmentation of the channels, put well here, http://www.stretchingthought.com/stories/storyReader$139 by Dan Fendel, means its harder to drown out all the other voices. It's not about "mass media" anymore (or at least that's the knife edge I see us balanced on at present) and given recent research that shows "six degrees of seperation" still holds in the email age of the global Internet, I'm not sure we need it... ( http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10925 ) So I agree, no blogger will, nor should IMHO, ever gain the political clout of Rush Limbaugh. Clout is just one of the many symptoms of political decline in a representative democracy, akin to cronyism, nepotism, and the other ills of centralised monopoly control, which is what central government is, just as much as the communication monopolies that have arisen in wireless and wired environments. But perhaps with recent developments (the report on LPFM and 802.11...) and the rise of RSS co-ordinated blogs, the pompous pundit proslytising for the privileged may face a more competitive future. PS. Very much like the "And" logic, a move away from "Vs" too.
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