I haven’t been posting any snapshots of the fireworks going on between some old media guys (David Brooks, Martin Peretz of The New Wornout Republic) and new media guys like Kos, Digby et all. It seemed like a lot of inside baseball and not particularly important alongside Israel’s reinvasion of Gaza, the increasing fighting in Afghanistan, the continuing IED warfare in Iraq — much less the weather news and all that might have to do with the really big monster — global climate change.
This post by Juan Cole changes that. In defending Kos, Cole is making a larger and I think very important point — one which I wish some of my readers understood better and were more excited about.
Blogs and on-line comminication is a paradigm shift from the old corporate model of information distribution. News and information, for good or for bad, no longer has to go through choke-points before it gets to your ears. Information now travels over distributed networks. Some nodes will cease functioning for periods of time, or will not pass on News A and will pass on News B, but as a whole they work in an entirely different way than the old centralized models. I’ll give you a good sample of Cole’s piece, but do go read all of it.
For all the talk about freedom of speech and individual freedom in the United States, ours is actually a hierarchical society in which most people cannot afford to speak out unless they are themselves independently wealthy. A lot of Americans work for corporations, which would just fire anyone who became so outspoken in public as to begin to affect their company’s image….
The very wealthy are used to getting their way in US politics and to dominating public discourse, since so much can be controlled at choke points. Journalists can just be fired, editors and other movers and shakers bought or intimidated. Look what happened to MSNBC reporter Ashleigh Banfield, who dared complain about the propaganda in the US new media around the Iraq War….
A grassroots communication system such as cyberspace poses a profound challenge to the forces of hierarchy and hegemony in American society. Now anyone with an internet connection and some interesting ideas can potentially get a hearing from the public.
Kos and his community, in short, are at the center of a discourse revolution. Now persons making a few tens of thousands of dollars a year can be read by hundreds of thousands of readers with no mediation from media moguls….
The lack of choke points in cyberspace means that people like Kos can’t just be fired. How then to shut them up? Why, you attempt to ruin their reputation, as a way of scaring off readers and supporters. This technique, as Billmon points out, does not usually work very well in cyberspace itself, though it can be effective if the blogger moves into a bricks and mortar institutional environment where big money and chokeholds work again. A political party is such an environment.
Cyberspace itself, though, is a distributed system, not a centralized one. That is why the charges against Kos are so silly. In essence, creatures of the old choke-point hegemonies are projecting their own hierarchical system inaccurately on Kos. Of course you wouldn’t expect people like Peretz or David Brooks to understand what a distributed information system is, dinosaurs as they are, of both politics and media.
