The blogosphere as coffee-house

What is the blogosphere about? As Jackie Danicki shows, the self-appointed experts don’t have a clue. Harry, though, is on the right track when he describes the blogosphere as resembling the old pamphleteer tradition. I think we should regard it as a new form of 17^th century coffee-house, a venue where men met on equal terms to exchange news and ideas.

And we need a new venue, because the two main existing areas from which ideas should emerge – the university and media – are corrupted, possibly beyond repair.

In the UK at least (I leave the US out) universities now live down to Althusser’s description of them as state ideological apparatuses. They pursue not research, but research funding. They don’t educate students so much as prepare them for the "world of work." They have been captured by the managerialist state.

And there’s more things wrong with the dead tree industry than you can shake a stick at. I’d cite its main failings as being: near-total statistical illiteracy; a slavish devotion to the notion of politics as mere electoral competition between two managerialist parties; and a lack of interest in ideas.

Blogging opens up a third forum. We can disseminate and test newish ideas, and rediscover old ones. In particular, ideas that don’t get an airing in the media – such as pro-war leftism or libertarianism – are well served by the blogosphere. And we can discuss what matters to us, rather than the trivial gossip of Westminster.

In this context, the dead-tree’s idea that the blogosphere lacks credibility and expertise is, of course, utter bollocks. It’s the dead-tree columnists who lack expertise – just compare them with my blogroll.

But why the coffee-house metaphor? Three reasons. First, coffee houses gave birth to the stock exchange and Lloyds insurance market – not that they were set up with this intention. This reminds us of an important fact – we cannot foresee how new inventions or discoveries will develop. The British blogosphere is, what, two years old. So why should we presume to know what directions it will take. Back in 1833 – two years after Faraday first generated electricity – no-one could have foreseen what effect electricity would have.

Secondly, coffee-houses – like the blogosphere and very unlike the dead tree business - were egalitarian places. You couldn’t win an argument by appealing to deference. As Richard Sennett put it in The Fall of Public Man:

The talk was governed by a cardinal rule: in order for information to be as full as possible, distinctions of rank were temporarily suspended; anyone sitting in the coffee-house had a right to talk to anyone else, to enter into any conversation, whether he knew the other people or not, whether he was bidden to speak or not. It was bad form even to touch on the social origins of other persons.

And thirdly, isn’t this description of a coffee-house, from 1675, also applicable to the blogosphere?

It is undeniable, that, as you have here the most civil, so it is, generally, the most intelligent society; the frequenting whose converse, and observing their discourses and deportment, cannot but civilize our manners, enlarge our understandings, refine our language, teach us a generous confidence and handsome mode of address, and brush off that pudor rubrusticus (as, I remember, Tully somewhere calls it), that clownish kind of modesty frequently incident to the best natures, which renders them sheepish and ridiculous in company.

So that, upon the whole matter, spite of the idle sarcasms and paltry reproaches thrown upon it, we may, with no less truth than plainness, give this brief character of a well-regulated coffee-house (for our pen disdains to be an advocate for any sordid holes, that assume that name to cloak the practice of debauchery), that it is the sanctuary of health, the nursery of temperance, the delight of frugality, an academy of civility, and free-school of ingenuity.

Comments

[Jarndyce]

Another one: the coffee houses of Change Alley were eventually stamped on by the government, afraid of what was going on there. This time round they won't need to: it'll be libel lawyers and assorted ambulance chasers sniffing a buck.

[EU Serf]

The wish to maintain credibility, the only currency of importance in the blogsphere makes the discussions that go on much more interesting that the slanging matches that so many other discussions end up as.

[backword dave]

I found that I stamped on the coffee-house analogy here http://backword.me.uk/2004/July/todoistobe.html, though I can't remember why I was so certain. New media are just different, I suppose, and metaphors blinker ...

[Backword Dave]

Ah, silly me: ignore the comma. The link should be http://backword.me.uk/2004/July/todoistobe.html

[free music]

Hi boys!81390a