Better Insularity
Garance Franke-Ruta lays out all the connections among bloggers who discussed Ezra Klein’s now-retracted lament that DC wasn’t doing enough to attract young, educated professionals to their city. In a way, it’s funny that this group really is so connected, and GFR laments it:
If you’re wondering why such an insular group couldn’t resolve something like this over a couple of phone calls and instead had to spill all this ink on it today, well, good question. You’d think at the very least Matt and Ezra could have worked this out over breakfast, but no, that’s not how the blogosphere works. I blame technology. Sometimes it’s good for everyone involved to hash everything out in public, and sometimes…well, it isn’t.
As someone who’s firmly outside the entire liberal/libertarian Adams Morgan DC blogger scene, let me say that I love the insularity. Surely, on balance, this openness in discussing issues, and being able to publicly work things is better than the alternative — having all the bloggers of similar political persuasion and location meet up (or IM, text, cell etc) and “work out” their disagreements so they can present a united front to the us, their readers. Surely discussion of DC’s urban policy shouldn’t be limited to those Garance mentions. Would we have had bloggers who aren’t in that social group talk about a subject that otherwise would have a very low probability of coming up in the regular run of what political bloggers talk about?
On the larger question, is that corner of the blogosphere too insular, too interconnected? Well, it may be, but we only know the extent of this interconnectedness because of how blogging works — it encourages, or at least allows, bloggers to write about their friends, and to acknowledge that the people whose work they’re writing about are their friends. In the traditional media, however, this is discouraged. I don’t know who David Brooks or EJ Dionne socialize with. Do I want to? Well, the social lives of middle aged journalists aren’t all that interesting, but I’m sure it influences what they write about and how they write about it. And I’d rather have all that business up front, and if that means occasionally reading descriptions of parties or seeing pictures of trap shooting expeditions, then so be it.
