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Re: Sunday, December 28, 2003
I don't see this as an either/or situation; rather, it is both/and. Blogs are media *and* journals. Anything on the web can be both broadcast and narrowcast. It is the internet that makes this possible: the fact that, by design, all nodes are visible to all other nodes. Applications such as the web exploit this. Survivability through redundancy, thanks to DARPA. Ironically, Panopticon becomes possible, too. What we couldn't do with the Bomb, we may do with lawyers (oops...my hyperbole detector is chattering madly). But control has always been the dark side of the enlightenment, of rationalization, as so many have pointed out. And then there is Melville, sitting uneasily in the nether regions of our collective consciousness: "Seeking to acquire a larger liberty, man but extends the empire of necessity." But wait...when did the word "media" become synonymous with "conglomerate"? What would the 19th century sense of the word have been? Time to do a little etymological foray. And I wonder if Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities, wherein he discusses the rise of the printing press, capitalism, and nationalism, has anything to say on the subject.
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