The Way We Were

Reynolds points to Matt Welch in the Columbia Journalism Review, who, while generally squared-away on his main point, nonetheless drops globs of sentimental rubbish along the way.

"Blogging technology has, for the first time in history, given the average Jane the ability to write, edit, design, and publish her own editorial product — to be read and responded to by millions of people, potentially — for around $0 to $200 a year. It has begun to deliver on some of the wild promises about the Internet that were heard in the 1990s. Never before have so many passionate outsiders — hundreds of thousands, at minimum — stormed the ramparts of professional journalism."

This is utter nonsense, and it's a great deal of why I resisted blogging for as long as I did. I read something like that, and I think I made a mistake in setting up a blog, precisely because of my distaste for fatuous rah-rahs.

To begin with, even if Welch is a dope when it comes to HTML, innumerable others didn't have that problem. Through most of the 90's, anyone able to logon in the first place could barely swing a dead cat without hitting someone who'd sorted out what it took to extend Gutenberg and Krassner into a digital arena. Long before my first cup of coffee in the morning (i.e. -- "without even thinking about it") I could point to Sam Smith's Progressive Review online as a splendid example of everything that Welch is holding out as exemplary of blogs, and Sam still isn't keeping a proper 'blog' to this day.

Beyond all that, however, it should be noted and understood that Web-babies do not have an exclusive corner on the net.block, and they never have. In fact, there were crucially important times when the real action wasn't taking place on the Web, at all.

I don't know where Welch or Reynolds were in, say, mid-1995, but I know where I was, and they weren't there where it counted. I didn't get, for example, a copy of Jane Sherburne's internal memo for the Clinton White House (in which The Lying Bastard was called "roadkill on the information superhighway") from the World Wide Web. I got it from alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater in Usenet. Nobody on the Web has, to this day, matched the investigative work on the Mena story that took place in the Whitewater group. I never corresponded with former Arkansas State Police Officer Russell Welch about the Mena affair through the Web. It all happened in Usenet and e-mail. The archives of that group -- before and for a short while after the DNC invasion of 1996 -- are filled with extremely close work on the Vince Foster case, and you can read about Allan Favish's case pending before the United States Supreme Court at the American Journalism Review online, but people who paid attention -- back in the day when it was cool for the "established media" to sneer at (ahem) "alternative" media, and way before blogs -- know that Allan comes from Usenet.

I'll also point out that, while they liked to sneer, they weren't above ripping lines out of Usenet. It happened to me a couple of times, and I wasn't the only one.

Obviously, I've concluded that blogs are a good thing. The software makes it easier for the thing that Welch is pointing out to happen, but it is quite ridiculous to hype blogs as something revolutionary. They're simply not. All the principles were in place long before anyone, anywhere, had the weblog gleam in their eye, and some people were putting the torch to media pretenses while "millions of people, potentially" could watch -- and join -- the action. "Fisking" was happening every day of the week, long before the proper noun became the verb (which I say is now shark-jumped, and has been for a long time).

History is one thing, but Welch is just hawking fashion. He should know better, but whether he does or not, there most certainly were people delivering on "promises about the Internet that were heard in the 1990s". That's the indisputable fact. They were working their asses off to do it, and it cost some of them dearly.

Props is props, and hype ain't. Let's get it straight.