Epistemographer

Another navel-gazing post about blogs. Yeah, there’ll probably be lots of navelgazing here at epistemographer.com (at least I didn’t call this The Reflexive Blog)…

So, as I was driving through torrential downpours from New York City to Ithaca tonight, I had a long cell-phone conversation with my mom about current affairs. Now, my mom is pretty up-to-the-minute as news consumers go, and we tend to have great talks about current affairs. However, I noticed something tonight – she hadn’t heard of a lot of the news items that I’ve been reading a lot about lately.

I asked her what she thought about the Iraq news of the past few days, and she assumed that I meant the presumed deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein. The interesting thing is that I wasn’t thinking of the siege in Mosul at all when I asked the question – to me, the big Iraq news was the slow, Watergate-esque climb up the Bush administration heirarchy in the examination of its questionable actions in presenting the case for invading Iraq to the American people.

So we’re talking, and I find myself explaining all about Joseph Wilson and his mission to Niger, Bush’s State of the Union address, the much-discussed 16 words, and Wilson’s recent editorial claiming fraud on the part of the Bush administration. She’s heard something about the State of the Union speech, but not much else. I bring up the attempted vilification of Joseph Wilson, the Robert Novak column on Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, and the various articles and columns about the ramifications of a white house official blowing the cover of a CIA operative. This is all (pardon the phrase) news to my mom, and I realize that she and I simply aren’t existing in the same media worlds right now.

I don’t have access to cable TV at Jenny’s place in Brooklyn (heck, we barely get a decent NBC broadcast signal), and I read the daily newspapers online, so with the exception of NPR or other talk radio while driving, pretty much all the news I get is via a computer screen. More importantly, I’ve been getting more and more of my news from blogs like TPM or Eschaton these days. That’s not to say that I’d claim these blogs as indistinguishable from a journalistic institution like the Washington Post – I’m well aware of the lower barriers to entry inherent in blogging, and in fact appreciate that they result in even more explicit biases. I can triangulate in on an issue by reading posts on it from across the “ideoblogical” range (heh…aren’t I cute). Plus, I’m a good enough relativist to acknowledge that there is no such thing as an “objective” press, and that claims to truth are ultimately validated or discarded based on the number of people who believe them to be true, rather than by neutral observers.

But I’m getting off topic – my real point here is that my mom and I seemed to have an entirely different picture of what’s “news”, hers based on television, mine based on blogs, with newspapers somewhere in between. Here’s where this gets interesting: it doesn’t seem like we’re just learning through different media that happen to prioritize news differently…it’s that the news cycle, and in fact the entire gatekeeping function of the blogosphere is qualitatively different from that of the mass media. More than that – I feel like I’m ahead of the curve, like the issues that I’m thinking about and reading about haven’t really hit the television news cycle yet, leaving me and my blog-informed knowledge-world out of sync with the one defined by more the “mass” television and newspaper media.

Lately, it seems that this lag of mass media behing blogs ranges anywhere between a week and a month. I’d love to see an agenda-setting study about the actual role that blogs play in setting the agenda for the mass media (which would make sense, since one would might assume that those working in media would be more active bloggers and blog-readers)…

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2003 at 4:24 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.