Stumbling and Mumbling

Why I blog

Richard North isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I reckon he's got a point. The convergence between (some) bloggers and the MSM onto an obsession with "fluff" and gossip is to be regretted.
I fear, though, that this question is badly posed, and not just because of the slightly hectoring tone:

You – collectively – can continue to play your little games. Or you can show up the media and the politicians and make the running. Which is it to be?

For me personally, though, there is a third possibility - non-involvement with the MSM. I say this for three reasons:
1. Blogging is a completely different activity. It's a conversation between equals, not ex cathedra statements of "fact."
This contrast always strikes me when I compare my blog with my day job. In the latter, I come across as an arrogant bastard, to a greater degree than I do in the blog. This is not just because I am an arrogant bastard, nor even because I'm a rubbish writer, though I'm both. It's because the architecture of blogging, the links and comments, allows for an egalitarian democratic debate. This is missing from the MSM, where there'll always be a them and us.
2. The MSM is profit-oriented. And profit-making sometimes excludes other ideals. You have to give readers what they want, rather than tell them awkward truths. You have to pretend to be well-informed, because people pay for expert knowledge, not for the opinion of any idiot. Honesty and egalitarianism can therefore disappear. And even when they don't (for example) in my day job, openness does disappear; my articles are behind a subscription wall.
3. The MSM won't change. It will always be hierarchical, deferential to "experts" and "senior figures", and obsessed with gossip. For this reason, I don't like Mike Ion's idea of what blogging's about:

Blogs...influence important actors within mainstream media who in turn frame issues for a wider public.

I don't think this is true. And I hope it isn't. For me, the ideal isn't to influence "important actors", but to abolish them - in both the MSM and in politics. And because this ideal is unattainable, the next best thing is to ignore them.
At risk of sounding pretentious (pretentious, moi?), I prefer to take my lead from Alasdair MacIntyre. There's a parallel between our hierarchical MSM and political elite and the late Roman Empire:

A crucial turning point...occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themsevles to achieve instead - often not recognizing fully what they were doing - was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness...For some time now we too have reached that turning point. (After Virtue, p263).

I won't be your Yoko Ono

Isn't Yoko Ono a strikingly handsome woman? I'd never noticed before. From MyHeritage, via Justin. who comes out rather better than me.

Biased sample fallacy

Clive Davis points to a confederacy of dunces slagging off bloggers.
This gives me a problem. I'm not sure who's committing the biased sample fallacy here: the dead-tree deadheads who think the one or two blogs they've read are a sample of the whole, or those of us who only bother with the higher-minded blogs.
But there's one thing I'm more sure about - much of the dead tree industry neither knows nor cares what the biased sample fallacy is.

A new feature

As part of my mission to bring you a better blogging experience in the face of unprecedented global challenges, I've added a little something to my sidebar - top blogging.
It's a selection of recent posts I've enjoyed, and recommend. I'll be updating it as often as I can.

The point of blogging

I'm not happy about the way some bloggers are congratulating themselves for their role in helping to undermine John Prescott.
It's not just the undertow of class hatred I dislike. I've got two other beefs.
First, there seems to be a premise that blogging gains its legitimacy only from being noticed by the political and journalistic elite. As the strapline here (reg req) says: "John Prescott's travails show that the political establishment can no longer ignore the growing tribe of bloggers."
I don't accept this. For me - and course this is just a matter of taste - the point of blogging is not to be co-opted by the MSM, but to show that there are alternatives to it.
Bloggers don't do this merely by pre-empting their stories (compare this with this, or this with this, to take today's examples). We/they do it by showing that there are viewpoints - left (and right) libertarianism, classical liberalism, the pro-war left - the MSM ignores. Others show that the dead trees don't have a monopoly on great writing, or that genuine expertise exists outside the dead trees.
Underpinning all this is a particular vision - that a free, egalitarian network is better than narrow hierarchies.
Secondly, the bloggers who are attacking Prescott perpetuate the notion that the fault in our political system lies only in the moral and intellectual failings of the particular individuals in office.
I reject this too. The problem is our political structures, not the personality failings of those in office. As I've said, office determines character more than character determines office. One purpose in blogging is to show that there are more alternatives to managerialist politics than the MSM lets on.
In both respects, blogging - for me - is part of a much bigger, much longer-term, project than merely engaging in day-to-day politics.
Iain Dale, maybe inadvertently, puts the contrast well. The Prescott affair, he says, shows that "blogs have helped make the political weather."
Precisely. The weather blows over and is forgotten in a few days.

Chrissy elsewhere

"There’s more evidence that Blair is a Marxist than that he’s a Christian"
At The Sharpener.

Against influence

Iain Dale perpetuates what, for me at least, is a myth about British blogging - that we're aiming to get the same influence as big American blogs like Daily Kos.
Include me out. I don't want to be widely influential; I'm delighted I'm not among his top political blogs. To be influential requires that people at least partly agree with you. But this implies that one's ideas have become repetitive and commonplace. The reaction I hope to get from readers isn't "I agree", but: "I hadn't thought of that."
It doesn't matter who agrees with me: as Alister says, we mustn't confound evidence with consensus.
Worse still, to become influential requires that one make compromises, that one recognizes the existence of "opinion formers." But almost all opinion formers are just egomaniacs who repeat the prejudices of traditional left or right tribes. I'm just not interested in winning their approval, or even their readership.
No. I blog simply because I enjoy writing and thinking, and suspect that some people might be interested in what I have to say. I don't want to win widespread influence. As Adam Smith said in his best book:

To a real wise man the judicious and well-weighed approbation of a single wise man, gives more heartfelt satisfaction than all the noisy applauses of ten thousand ignorant though enthusiastic admirers.

And as Marx should have said: "the point is not to change the world, but to understand it."

Contrafibularities

My incremental post-industrial decontextualized multiparadigmed pedagogical exercise in post-textual neo-semioticist non-narrative discourse has encountered   contumelious reprobation from  a pseudo-objectivist  deconstruction.
That is, my blog is crap. According to this, it's got a Gunning-Fog index of just 10.25. That makes it more readable than the Wall Street Journal or the Guardian.
This is a failure. It's meant to be more inteligent than those - but not more accessible. I don't want to be read by just anyone, you know. This isn't for the riff-raff.
Worse still, I use only 1.56 syllables per word. Surely a record low for an economist, albeit one who hasn't yet blogged on generalized autoregessive conditional heteroscedasticity. I'm anaspeptic, frasmotic, even compunctuous to have been caused such pericumbobulation.

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.

Googletastic-not

What do the following phrases have in common? “Backward country”, “normal for Norfolk”, “buying cows”, “should we raise the minimum wage”, “difference in biscuits”, “unethical investing”, “loans for non-mortgage payers”, “Worstall redistributive”, “equity premium puzzle Prescott” and “Sizzla homophobia.”

It’s that I’m number one in Google for all of them. And what’s more, people have actually linked here from these searches in the last couple of days.

There must be an awful lot of disappointed Google users out there.

Most disappointed of all, though, will be the two people who came here through “Kathy Sykes sex”. I’m sixth for this - but it is the one subject in the world about which I am most ill-informed.