WHY BLOGGING IS IMPORTANT TO ME, YOU AND DEMOCRACY

Saturday, November 16, 2002

The world of people who run private Web logs on the Internet has not only a new name -- ``blogosphere'' -- but it's gaining academic respect, as the Yale University Law School hosts a conference Friday on this anyone-can-do-it publishing phenomenon.

What's a Web log? It's a Web page, first, and second a log of interesting or irritating stuff the host has encountered on the Internet, enlivened by said host's witty and acerbic comments and punctuated with hyperlinks so the reader can jump to the original and read the whole thing. It's the Reader's Digest on Internet time, instant, interactive, uncensored access to a dazzle of events and ideas.

And it's going to be as important a political force as talk radio.

The phrase ``Web log'' was soon clipped to ``blog,'' with all associated noun and verb forms arising spontaneously shortly thereafter.

You could start your tour of the blogosphere anywhere, because it is promiscuously interconnected. But I like Glenn Harlan Reynolds' instapundit.com, because it has a good mix of material and I like his commentary (see ``witty and acerbic'' above). For a law professor (at the University of Tennessee) he's pretty funny.

So why is this potentially important?

First, it's the sheer scale of it.

Reynolds says his site gets an average of 75,000 individual visits a day. That's a larger circulation than about 90 percent of U.S. daily newspapers, and probably a larger readership. Most people who buy a newspaper don't intend to read everything in it -- they might go directly to sports or stocks or grocery coupons - but someone who clicks to a Web page will usually at least look at what's on it.

One of the things to look at on Instapundit Thursday was a link to the Rocky Mountain News story about Cong Lu, whose painting Self Portrait of a Martyr won an award at the Art Students League of Denver and touched off a controversy. Other bloggers have examined the art, the controversy and the story, linking it to similar controversies around the country.

Second, blogging is fast.

When Paul Wellstone's memorial service mutated into a political pep rally, bloggers were spreading outrage practically before it was off the air. Lots of people -- including Fritz Mondale, to judge by his comments the day after the election -- believe the unbridled partisanship on display may have cost him the Senate election in Minnesota. Did it cost the Democrats control of the Senate? Could be -- there were other close races that broke for Republicans in the last few days.

Third, it enforces a certain level of honesty.

Michael Moore, the odious filmmaker of Bowling for Columbine and other tendentious rants, was crowing before Election Day that ``Years from Now, They'll Call It 'Payback Tuesday.' '' Not so, and now the hollow boast has quietly disappeared from his Web site. But blogger Rachel Lucas kept a copy, which she eviscerated line by fatuous line. It's crow, and he can eat it.

That line-by-line exegesis of idiocy, by the way, is dubbed ``Fisking,'' after journalist Robert Fisk, who often deserves it.

I wouldn't want to leave the impression that bloggers exclusively inhabit the right hemisphere. The left is well represented also, and Fisking is mutual (but our Fiskers are funnier).

In fact, one of the things I like best about Instapundit is that it offers a measured exposure to the fever swamps of the left. Since I gave up on the Utne Reader when it seemingly couldn't find anyone who thought that Afghanistan might be better off without the Taliban, I need an alternative source.

Blogging might be fun, but it is serious business. Reynolds says, ``my chief interest is in the intersection between advanced technologies and individual liberty.''

That's the focus, also, of the Information Society Project at Yale, which is putting on next week's conference, ``Revenge of the Blogs'' (islandia.law.yale. edu/isp).

The project's goals are to promote democratic values in a digital age, to study how new media alter culture and society and to investigate how law and technology interact.

The writer A.J. Liebling famously said, ``Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,'' but owning a press is a rather expensive proposition. Blogging isn't, and that's why it matters to democracy.