Digby is Kaiser Soze!
Color me cynical, but methinks the entire “revealing of Digby” charade going at the Take Back America Conference is just a little lame . And the entire idea of a pseudonymous person being popular or influential because of what they write on the Internet is just a little too reminiscent of Ender’s Game. Should we be calling Digby Demonsthenes or Locke?
UPDATE: Ezra Klein points out that I really don’t know a bunch about the blogosphere. There is, in fact, a blogger named Demosthenes, and not surprisingly, he got his name from Ender’s Game. Unfortunately, there’s no sign he’s about to rise to power by the power of his blog posts, so maybe Ender’s Game isn’t the best analogy for the blogosphere.
Can I make the same comment on two different blogs?
How about Thomas Pynchon?
A different matt
June 19, 2007 at 1:26 pm
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The Usual Suspects « Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper
June 19, 2007 at 3:09 pm
You are against the notion of a person gaining influence “because of what they write on the Internet”.
So you would prefer someone be influential, not because of their ideas or insights, but because of who they know, or who they are (demographics), or how much money they have? Or perhaps because of what they do — a perfectly valid metric, except that what one does on the Internet is to, um, write.
Bee L. Zeebub
June 20, 2007 at 9:29 am
This was a reference to Ender’s Game, where two teenagers basically exercise a coup because of their newsgroup postings. And I meant influential, ie influences policy directly and all that stuff. It would be weird for someone to be pseudonymous and have a large, singular influence on policies or elections.
Matt Zeitlin
June 20, 2007 at 9:35 am
Well, maybe not that weird. Certainly it’s normal enough for bloggers to exercise no small amount of influence based on their blogging, and a lot of liberal bloggers are (or at least, I suppose, were) pseudonymous. Duncan Black comes readily to mind. So does Digby, whom (all kidding aside) a lot of people pay close attention to.
But I didn’t choose that moniker because I actually thought that the fate of nations would ride on my postings. It was more based on the idea that I found so fascinating in Ender’s Game: that it is the writing, rather than the writer, that could determine the influence of a post. It was this idea that used to form the center of all political debate online, and I’m a little sorry that bloggers seem to have abandoned it so quickly in their pursuit of newspaper inches and TV time.
Such is life, I suppose.
Demosthenes
July 4, 2007 at 2:07 pm