Today on Alternet.org, Micah L. Sifry (of The Nation) posted a rather lengthy piece titled The Rise of Open-Source Politics. It opens...

Whether you're a Democrat in mourning or a Republican in glee, the results from election day should not obscure an important shift in America's civic life. New tools and practices born on the internet have reached critical mass, enabling ordinary people to participate in processes that used to be closed to them.

As he discloses about a third of the way through the article, author Michael L. is the brother of Technorati founder David Sifry. So if you didn't get it from the article's title, at this point you know this screed isn't going to be another hack on the Evil Blog Empire -- despite all my personal efforts to create one. One such effort is referred to in the Alternet piece...

But it isn't the quantity of interactions taking place that suggests the change under way; it is the quality of those conversations. If, as a New Yorker cartoon put it, "On the internet, no one knows if you're a dog," on the internet, no one likes it if you don't speak in a genuine human voice. Says Christopher Locke, one of the co-authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a bible of sorts for business people trying to understand how the internet is changing commerce:

Compared to this kind of personal, intimate, knowledgeable and highly engaged voice ... top-down corporate communications come across as stale and stentorian -- the boring, authoritarian voice of command and control. The glaring difference between these styles is the strange attractor that has brought tens of millions flocking to the internet. There's new life passing along the wires. And it hasn't been coming from corporations. Nor has it been coming from politicians, not until recently.

The way the piece is laid out, it seems I wrote that whole paragraph in Cluetrain. But the quote from the book ends: "...and it isn't coming from corporations." (See for yourself.) The last sentence about politicians -- for the whole lot of whom I give not the proverbial fig -- was added by Mr. Sifry or an intervening editor. Being generous, perhaps someone forgot to add a <p> tag. Being less generous, I don't like having words put in my mouth. While I appreciate being quoted, I appreciate even more (dare I say it?) the kind of journalistic attention to detail that takes care about quotation marks and that important little matter of correct attribution.

Sure, I've been misquoted in the mainstream press. Many times. Usually it was just sloppy notetaking or terminal idiocy. Understandable in today's hectic gene pool. Here though, I feel I'm being enlisted in support of something I never signed up for.

My Cluetrain co-author, David Weinberger, did sign up -- to work with the Dean campaign. He was also a vocal supporter of John Kerry, campaigning for that candidate whether officially or ad-hoc-en-blog. Good for him. I like David and appreciate his views. He certainly knows more about politics than I. Were it up to me, and thank your lucky charms it isn't, we might all be living under the leadership of President Hunter S. Thompson and Vice President Madame Levy. Now that  would be a bottom-up grassroots ticket I might vote for.

Sifry sub-heads one section of his piece, "The Emerging Internet Majority," which he believes with characteristic fervor ("a paradigm shift" he says) will make it all better, or at least all different. I'm sure. But there is, it seems to me, a glaring assumption in this, not even modestly veiled, that "we internetters" (my phrase, my quotes) constitute some sort of roughly unified coalition bent on doing something or other. And nothing could be further from the truth. Having an internet connection once defined an emerging band of unruly freaks -- I proudly among them. Today being online is one step above having indoor plumbing. Does the fact that so many of us have running water bode good or ill for the body politic? OK, make the criteria a bit (pun intended) more information-based. Is there a powerful moral force of telephone dialers? Of electrical-appliance pluggers-in? Does Being Digital really say that much about who or what we are? Does it in fact -- after all the street-cred advertising pages have been sold -- say anything?

There are many highly non-unified factions on the net I would not want to spend time with, much less be governed by. That they are speaking with their "genuine voices" -- whatever that means; I could never quite figure out who decides the definition of genuine -- is a good thing, I suppose, in general terms, for a self-styled democracy like ours. It creates the necessary cacophony and confusion that allows deep-pocketed oligarchs to run things out of view, while at the same time appearing to support something sorta kinda like freedom of the press. Blogs originally messed up this equation, but they've been brought into line by the tried and true methods of co-option. A certain class of bloggers ran, did not walk, into the arms of Big Government, Big Media and Bigger Higher Education as soon as the chance presented itself. Now their voices, leaving the thorny issue of genuineness aside, sound like those of Beltway lobbyists, over-puffed pundits and professorial fools of the sort I never did manage to suffer gladly. You know who you are. And so do we.

Am I alone in thinking these awful thoughts? Doesn't seem so. Consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds (as Emerson tells us), let me enlist a voice speaking from the heart of the Big Media beast itself...

It was a cool idea, a fresh kind of media democracy for a new-media world. Thanks to the miracle of blogging technology, any smart kid in Boise or Brooklyn could set up his own Web site and weigh in on everything from regime change in Iraq to snarky book reviews. ... [yada-yada] ... Part reporter, part gadfly, part cheeky upstart, bloggers seemed to scorn the insider mentality of brand-name pundits, and they were often a lot more fun to read -- and more insightful.

Note the past tense. A year ago, I barely knew what blogs were. Within a few months, they'd become a staple of my daily media diet. Now I can't live without them, but already I'm feeling betrayed -- and a little bored.

What began as the ultimate outsider activity -- a way to break the newspaper and TV stranglehold on the gathering and dissemination of information -- is turning into the same insider's game played by the old establishment media the bloggerati love to critique. The more blogs you read and the more often you read them, the more obvious it is: They've fallen in love with themselves, each other and the beauty of what they're creating. The cult of media celebrity hasn't been broken by the Internet's democratic tendencies; it's just found new enabling technology.

from: It's a Little Too Cozy in the Blogosphere by Jennifer Howard
source: The Washington Post, 16 November 2003
via: HighBeam Research

Look, I didn't feel this rant coming on. Maybe it's a gene-trigger thing. But it did creep up and take ahold of my unwitting brain. So here you have it. But all this barking barked, do read Micah Sifry's whole article, as I'm sure there's a lot my high blood pressure caused me to miss. Especially the good words of David Weinberger and Dan Gillmor, who certainly know more about politics and press than I ever will. God willing.

Oh, and I want to say, finally, what a big fan of Technorati I am. In fact, as soon as I post this, I plan to ping the site in hopes of a billion hits in better newsreaders everywhere. Send pageviews! Send circ! Visions of sugarplums I already got.