Monday, December 31, 2001

IN BLOG SPACE NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM: Brian Linse points out this story by James C. Bennett of UPI about blogging. He draws a historical parallel that I couldn't possibly comment on between the current professional media and academic types and the Church in Europe right before the Reformation. He isn't all bubbly on blogs but he gives them their due, and he talks about the Anglosphere at length --a neat term I can't remember hearing before for the English-speaking nations of the world. This paragraph stuck out:

One of the most interesting and generally unreported aspects of the Weblog phenomenon is its unconscious Anglosphereness. Blog space is pretty much Anglosphere space, in that the network of bloggers, and especially the post-911 "warblogs," publish all over the Anglosphere, and quote freely from media sources across the Anglosphere, but rather sparsely from outside it. (Several redoubtable Norwegians, blogging in English, are the primary exception). For every link to, say, the English edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, there are hundreds to the London Evening Telegraph or the Times.

Which reminds that Bjoern Staerk has covered the latest India-Pakistan brouhaha from the perspective of Indian and Pakistani papers and you should go over there and check it out. Bennett also says that, as a blogger, I am an "early adopter." That's not true, I didn't own a laserdisc player until it was far, far too late.

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