Blogging has enormous depth, Ctd

I've looked at the US bloggers Andrew Sullivan (@SullyDish)and Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) and Christopher Hitchens who all talked about the depth of blogging. I also looked at what Paul Krugman had to say about blogging. I've also looked the the UK legal bloggers David Allen Green (@JackofKent) and Adam Wagner (@AdamWagner1). The internet has had an incredible democratic and levelling effect. As Paul Krugman said:

"Academic credentials are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for having your ideas taken seriously... if someone without formal credentials consistently makes trenchant, insightful observations, he or she has earned the right to be taken seriously, regardless of background."

All the above have attested to the depth, authority and veracity of the new medium. Daniel Hannan (@DanHannanMEP) added his voice to the debate:

"The separate categorisation of columnists, reporters, bloggers and interested readers is becoming meaningless. Every citizen is now a potential journalist. News and opinion are a conversation. We still hear occasional complaints from Leftie pundits that online media “lack quality control”. In fact, the dialectic element of blogging ensures a higher standard of accuracy than before. Mistakes are ruthlessly exposed and, because of the sheer number of outlets, a plausible new theory can spread with previously unimagined speed. 

Blogs have improved veracity, quality and diversity. They have not led to the segregation by opinion that many predicted: Leftists and Rightists argue online in a way that never happened when people took just one newspaper. It's true that bloggers, being human, are as prone to cruelty, stupidity and error as anyone else. But it has never been easier to go elsewhere: more people are reading more news and comment than at any time in history."

On what blogging is all about, Greenwald put it best:

"I began [blogging] without any plan to become a journalist or writer, but simply to participate as a citizen."

Glenn Greenwald on the abuse of state power through terror laws

Glenn Greenwald said here of the lessons learnt from the Church Committee:

"The lesson of the Church Committee from the 1970s is that when you allow people in government to spy on Americans in the dark with no accountability and without warrant, they abuse that power and that’s what’s happened; it’s rampant abuse and it needs sunlight."

Glenn Greenwald has previously also cited Cicero who said: "Laws are silent in times of war." Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) said of Glenn Greenwald and the abuse of terrror laws:

"In this respect, I can say this to David Cameron. Thank you for clearing the air on these matters of surveillance. You have now demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that these anti-terror provisions are capable of rank abuse. Unless some other facts emerge, there is really no difference in kind between you and Vladimir Putin. You have used police powers granted for anti-terrorism and deployed them to target and intimidate journalists deemed enemies of the state. 

You have proven that these laws can be hideously abused. Which means they must be repealed. You have broken the trust that enables any such legislation to survive in a democracy. By so doing, you have attacked British democracy itself. What on earth do you have to say for yourself? And were you, in any way, encouraged by the US administration to do such a thing?"

Glenn Greenwald - Lawyer, blogger, partisan journalist

Glenn Greenwald said in an interview with the FT: 

"The way I entered the public discourse was a fairly untraditional route. I did not get my own column in the New York Times, I created my own blog on Blogspot. In order to break through and be heard and force media figures to respond, there had to be a lot of aggression. I have a bigger platform now than I did several years ago, so I probably should have adjusted my tactics a little bit more. I don’t need to be so acrimonious and aggressive but you do not always realise that your position has changed. I still think of myself as an outsider who is not at The New York Times or Washington Post, so I need to speak loudly and sometimes harshly. Part of it is personality: I enjoy the clash of ideas. I am not looking to be liked by them [Washington journalists] so the acrimony comes a little more easily for me."

The best in legal commentary via @JackofKent

Won't be long. But for legal comment follow: @AdamWagner1 @JoshuaRozenberg @carlgardner @Familoo @copyrightgirl @Lyndon_Harris @DBanksy
— Jack of Kent (@JackofKent) January 29, 2014

David Allen Green (@DavidAllenGreen) (@JackofKent) is away from Twitter and the blogosphere. He's writing (a "wretched") book.

Andrew Sullivan - Blogging has enormous depth

Andrew Sullivan said in 2006 on what blogging is:

"My own approach is I'm just a thinking out loud person. I'm a conservative who is attacking [George] Bush which is putting me in a strange position. The limitation of a blog is that it has to be instant; which means it can't be a terribly considered judgement. But it's also deep because you can have hyperlinks that link the reader to original sources and original texts. So readers, unlike TV, or even unlike newspapers, readers can look at my opinion and then they can go to the original source and make their own mind up. That is enormous depth."

In full here. Previous blog on Andrew Sullivan and legal blogging here. This blog post was originally posted on my law blog, Twitter for Lawyers here.

The Influence of Andrew Sullivan, Ctd

Ross Douthat wrote of Andrew Sullivan in The New York Times here:

"The day the gay marriage rulings were handed down I raised the possibility, on Twitter, that Andrew Sullivan might deserve to be remembered as the most influential political writer of his generation, and I was happy to see Tyler Cowen flesh that argument out:                           

Doesn’t... Sullivan have a reasonably strong claim to that title, especially after the recent Supreme Court decisions on gay marriage? Sullivan was the dominant intellectual influence on this issue, from the late 1980s on, and that is from a time where other major civil liberties figures didn’t give gay marriage much of a second thought, one way or the other, or they wished to run away from the issue. Here is his classic 1989 New Republic essay. Here is a current map of where gay marriage is legal and very likely there is more to come.

Ross Douthat continued his analysis of Andrew Sullivan:

"No writer of comparable gifts was on the issue earlier, pushed harder against what seemed at the time like an unassailable consensus, engaged as many critics (left and right, gay and straight) and addressed himself to as many audiences as Sullivan. No intellectual did as much to weave together the mix of arguments and intuitions that defines today’s emerging consensus on the issue — in which gay marriage is simultaneously an expression of bourgeois conservatism and the fulfillment of the 1960s’ liberative promise, the civil rights revolution of our time and a natural, Burkean outgrowth of the way that straights already live. And no intellectual that I can think of, writing on a fraught and controversial topic, has seen their once-crankish, outlandish-seeming idea becomes the conventional wisdom so quickly, and be instantantiated so rapidly in law and custom."

I wrote an earlier post on the influence of Andrew Sullivan here. New York Times post in full here.

Paul Krugman - You don't need to be an academic to be taken seriously online

Paul Krugman explains on his New York Times that you don't need fancy academic letters behind your name to be taken as a serious, credible and authoritative voice online and on the blogosphere. He said: 

"But academic credentials are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for having your ideas taken seriously. If a famous professor repeatedly says stupid things, then tries to claim he never said them, there’s no rule against calling him a mendacious idiot — and no special qualifications required to make that pronouncement other than doing your own homework.

Conversely, if someone without formal credentials consistently makes trenchant, insightful observations, he or she has earned the right to be taken seriously, regardless of background.

One of the great things about the blogosphere is that it has made it possible for a number of people meeting that second condition to gain an audience. I don’t care whether they’re PhDs, professors, or just some guy with a blog — it’s the work that matters."

Read in full here. 

 

Writing on paper, Ctd

Via the Dish (here) I came across this Slate Magazine article entitled, 'I Write All My Blog Posts Out Longhand, and You Should Too'.

Justin Peters said:

"I am a professional blogger, and in many ways I live up to the least flattering stereotypes of the job... But I defy the stereotypes in at least one respect: I write most of my blog posts out by hand before I publish them... 

I've always enjoyed writing things by hand, but I didn't formalize the process until I started blogging daily for Slate. Almost every morning, before the day starts and I start drowning in emails, I go to a coffee shop with a pen and a small Moleskine notebook. There, I try to conceive and write drafts of two separate posts before 10:30 a.m. Then, it’s back to my apartment, where I shed my pants, transcribe, and refine what I’ve written. (One of the nice things about writing my posts by hand is that it allows for a built-in revision process.) 

Christopher Hitchens - The authority of bloggers

At 7 minutes 30 seconds in the video above and here Christopher Hitchens talks about the authority of the online writers.

"I became a journalist because I didn't want to have to rely on the press for information. I'm very sorry for people who do think that's what they're getting when they buy the New York Times in the morning. I only read it to make sure I know what everyone else thinks is going on. It's useful to know what people think is the news. None of my sources are from the press... Yes, from bloggers and their allies I get most of what I think I need to know and I'm very happy at the possibility of, the evident likelihood now of the decline of the networks and of the flagship newspapers, which seem to me to be engines of reassurance and consensus and bad writing, poor English. Let it all die, I don't give a damn."

In an earlier post here on how Hitchens write, Christopher said: "I don’t use any of the new technology stuff."