nihilism and the great blogging self-doubt

Good job to HLIB for an excellent summary of some good stuff. I seriously am still chewing on the blah-feme piece, Does the blogsphere have a subconcious, from a few days ago. But I think the charges of Nihilism stem in some measure from the MSM people feeling a bit put upon.

The printed and broadcasted message has lost its aura. News is consumed as a commodity with entertainment value. Instead of presenting blog entries as mere self promotion, we should interprete them as decadent artifacts that remotely dismantle the broadcast model.

The quote is from here. I mean, I really do remember thinking Walter Cronkite was a great guy, but please. Then I turned 8 and I thought he should have ridden Gerald Ford out of town on a Vietnamese tent-post. But he didn't. And there wasn't any aura. And the Iran-Contra people walked off scott-free too. What "aura" protected them but a Nihilistic MSM that forgives power and said to fuck with the rest of you. I ranted about other parts of that mentality a few days ago.

More interesting to me is when blah-feme says:

And, perhaps, the dreadfulness of the right's blogs does not have so much to do with its ideological underpinnings, but, precisely, with the extent to which the blogosphere is, dare I say it, ontologically at odds with modes of thought that seek to reduce, simplify or moralise the social field. At its best, blogging can and continues to hold the promise of refusing that kind of hectoring modality.

A hectoring modality present in Geert Lovink's nihilism, I might add. And so my blog sits next to the blog of Blondie Marketing Bimbo, and that of smiling Real-Estate Wizmo, and both of them are going to tell me how my blog could be better. They will say how I should use certain key-words and increase my traffic by this or that means. And the idea of offending anyone with a single political admission is again, what allowed the verneer to come smearing off the MSM like ... well enough of that simile. But political admissions are not to be avoided.

I think the very hopeful thing in the blah-feme post is this:

agency has a way of biting back, of digging in just when you think its all over, and it often does so when a number of ideas authored over a large time period are drawn together as a uniform resource: the blogoshpere might form a large part of that resource.

I don't see people at DailyKOS ranting and screaming about People Magazine or PBS (outside it's elitist, right-wing political talk-shows), or at the stuff that fills up our days with non-political mash. Yet David Brooks is still publishing his Mayberry-Swastika pieces in the New York Times with his aura all in tatters down around his dockers, and we just may see some of the highest people in US political history going to prison over the next few years. Maybe.

That won't happen because the aura came off, or because of Nihilism. I think it will happen because of good old American-style hope. Subconcious or not, the blogosphere does seem to have a conscience.