It's just that I'm confounded by the rhetoric of blogs. When you have James Wolcott and Xiaxue in the same world, you can't really define it. I suppose then that the rhetoric of blogs is that there is no rhetoric. It's open to anyone to express any ideas they want to. If I want to talk about how my cat chased a squirrel around yesterday, I'm going to.
Blogs have yet to penetrate "mainsteam" media in the sense that blogs are uncontrolled and totally open. The blog reports you see on CNN and MSNBC are very controlled and scrutinized. However, if I were to make a guess, I would say that news media will drastically change because of blogs.
Last night I was watching the news tease they do before the actual news to entice a viewer to watch, and it occurred to me that the days of the tease are nearly over. If I were interested in one of the stories they were teasing, I would look for it online. Either I could sit through a boring, clunky newscast for an hour or read the story online in about five minutes.
Which suggests that blogs will change the way we view copyright and intellectual property. Bloggers are capable of posting information far quicker than any television news or newspaper and therefore will change the way we look at news. Newspapers will no longer be able to get by on writing news from the day before, as it will be long gone. In the coming years, the long drawn copyright battle of the last century will be over, and the winner will be freedom of ideas. Copyright will vanish.
Blogs are changing the frequency with which we write as well. Normally on a paper such as this I would write a rough draft, put it under intense scrutiny and submit it four or five days later. Now, I plan on posting this as soon as I finish it. So the rhetoric of blogs could be the speed of meme transmission, and that in itself is an excellent mirror of our culture.
Maybe I've kicked more of a field goal than a punt, but I'm still confused and not too sure if I have it in me to throw any more touchdowns.
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