The 'online community' and similar bullshit. posted by Richard Seymour

Meta-blogging on a Sunday afternoon, then. Jeremy Paxman was thoroughly roasted by David Miller the other night on BBC Newsnight in an exchange about 'The Contribution of the Blogger to War Reporting'. The unctuous retail of stillborn cliches about 'the online community' reeks of both fear and condescension toward Bloggers. The mainstream media know that they are losing their hegemony on 'balance', 'truth' and even on the news, since it often comes down to some diligent bloggers to unearth crucial facts. Hence, fear. The condescension part comes in when Bloggers are depicted as fanatical, monomaniacal, sustaining attention on minute details for months on end. They, Paxman intimated, can do this while journalists are obliged to move on to new stories and new angles in a fast-changing 24-hour news world governed by the fickle proclivities of those who imbibe the product. Well excuses, eh?

However, there is an attempt to coopt Bloggers as a sort of new 'commentariat', an online community of natterers, a cyberspace chattering class, one that validates and corroborates the existing media diapason of gossips, bores, ranters and joke-boxes. There is, as it happens, an old Northern Irish joke that sums up my attitude to this community: St Peter is standing at the pearly gates, administering the bouncer treatment to would-be entrants to heaven, when he notices that half-way down the queue is a bulky IRA man in army fatigues and a green balaclava. St Peter strides up to him and says "Excuse me, but I don't think you can get in here." The man says to him "Who wants in? You've got twenty minutes to get the fuck out!"

As I mentioned before, I want no part of this narcissistic gang of petit-bourgeois navel-gazers, particularly with their latest Ways To Be Good. Hence, I wasn't even remotely put out when a number of people wrote to me to point out that the Tomb hadn't been included in The Guardian's run-down of The new commentariat. No, what I was put out by was that celebrity had eluded me yet again. I swiftly resumed composure, and reconciled myself to never having the pleasure of meeting Oliver Kamm.

However, the article does raise one or two minor points of interest about Bloggery. Kamm says, for instance, that blogging is "an essentially parasitic medium, that can only exist insofar as it feasts on the output of traditional media." I suppose the day had to come when a stockbroker would admit to being a parasite, and I daresay in his hands it is entirely true. But if blogging were only about regurgitating the day's news in an onanistic fashion, and remoulding it in the shape of one's polemical preferences, then it would be a sumptuary triviality. At best, the good writers would be read and the bad ones would be contracted to work for The Times. Tim Ireland and Justin McKeating at least have used their sites as a kind of intervention, the former galvanising anti-Blair opinion and the latter reporting goings-on in constituency campaigning - the sort of thing that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. There are a host of activist blogs of various shades and descriptions, some of which break stories, while others track and organise information on particular themes. Some deploy immense intellectual resources, philosophical insight, learning, literary flair, wit etc., while others provide campaign information and links between different groups of activists.

The difference, then, is between the kind of 'commentariat' that merely amplifies and elevates the ignorant, knee-jerk bar rant to the status of political commentary (Harry's Place, for instance), and the kind of bloggers who truly do threaten the traditional media's hegemony, because they resist it or side-step it. It isn't just that bloggers can be citizen journalists, it is often that journalists now have blogging as a means of getting out information and perspectives that are eternally lost on the small-picture news. Not only that, but bloggers can provide an heuristic, an interpretive framework, that is not usually available within the narrow discourse of most corporate media outlets. I am obviously not referring to the ersatz contrarianism of a certain kind of Bloggery, since that is already amply catered for. Rather, the kind that dispenses with or problematises the clutter of short-hand phrases and petty deceptions that the media is heir to. The kind that undoes the spell-binding, asphyxiating effect of glibness, snarkiness and totemic phrases that appear to explain what they in fact occlude ('the divided communities', 'men of violence', 'moderates', 'extremists' etc). Ted Koppel recently made Chomsky's point about the corporate news for him: "This is an industry, it's a business. We exist to make money. We exist to put commercials on the air. The programming that is put on between those commercials is simply the bait we put in the mousetrap." The crucial point about blogging, then, is that people can be in various ways participants, not just virtual rodents to be baited to a metaphorical death.