Mr. Wolfe, “weary of narcissistic shrieks and baseless ‘information,’ ” says he no longer reads blogs.
The Wall Street Journal has an article Happy Blogiversary, celebrating ten years of blogs with some commentary by various folks, Mr. Tom Wolfe among them. Thanks, Steven Krause, for the link.
My favorite part of this article, besides perhaps Wolfe’s comment, is from Harold Evans, editor at large of The Week, who writes:
Coming from a print culture where the rule was check, check, source, source, I was chilled, in the early days of the blogosphere, by the easy dissemination of lies.
Did you know that 9/11 was the work of the Mossad? How else can you explain that the 4,000 Jews were tipped off to stay away that morning? Gibberish, of course, but widely believed in the Muslim world.
In Indonesia, Tom Friedman reported, only 5% of the population could get on the Web, but these 5% spread rumor as fact: “They say, ‘He got it from the Internet.’ They think it’s the Bible.”
In this case, the revealed “truth” was a blog by one Sy Adeeb, writing from Alexandria, Va., under the logo of Information Times (with an address at the National Press Building in Washington, which had no trace of him). When I tracked him down, he told me he got it from Al Manar, the Hezbollah station in Beirut.
Once upon a time, Adeeb would be sending out smudged mimeographed sheets that would never see the light of day. Now, as bloggers on the Web, Adeeb and others like him have a megaphone to the world, with this spurious authenticity of electronic delivery.
Of course, he qualifies this statement by stating afterward that there are some great things about blogs, but what strikes me as interesting in this is the belief that blogs, in general, are a medium full of lies, based on a few examples.
And I’m not trying to defend blogs, saying, hey, those are just a few examples. Most of the stuff is true! Rather, I’m saying, wait a minute, we can make the same claim about any medium. In fact, here it is: I can’t trust print news media because they are full of lies and their readers take it as truth, stating, “I read it in the paper.” Case in point: “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.”
Not that the point I made there is anything new.
But at least Mr. Evans referenced the mimeograph. My heart is atwitter.
