Christopher Lydon Doesn’t Care About Blog People

Not really trying to be controversial. Just thought it was interesting.

From a recent show of "Radio Open Source," which the host, Christopher Lydon, calls "a show infused with the political energy of the Internet" (0'58").

Open Source / Blog Archive / Justice Miers: A Blogosphere Scorned

Christopher Lydon is defending his title as a blog-lover:

(20'32")CL: Don't mistake me. As a fan of the blogosphere, and I am one and I'm a blogger…

But this defense came a while after Lydon emphasized the perceived inequalities of that same "blogosphere":

(7'32")Randy Barnett, you're a blogger but you're a grown-up, shall we say, among bloggers, a law professor too, I'm just wondering…

To which Barnett replied:

(7'52")RB: First of all, I don't want to distance myself from the rest of the blogosphere… I learn a lot on the blogosphere even though they may not be law professors…this is the premise of your whole show and I think that we law professors have a lot to learn. I always learn from the bloggers.

Lydon sees himself as a blogger and tends to have a very specific perspective on blogging. That perspective can be seen in parallel with the more individualistic dimensions of online communication. For one thing, the rule is for first-person singular pronouns on this specific "blogosphere." Which, in itself, is quite interesting.
Another interesting aspect of Lydon's perspective of blogging is to see pre-Internet communication as blogging:

Thomas Paine was a blogger without the software. So was the weekly mail pamphleteer I. F. Stone, our anti-war hero of the 1960s and 70s and the only certifiable genius I ever encountered in journalism. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a fount of sturdy values (father of “the American religion,” says Harold Bloom) was a proto-blogger. And Emerson’s magazine The Dial in the 1840s, with Thoreau, Fuller, Alcott among the Concord co-conspirators, was the original group blog.

But still, the point about differentiating blogging law professors from other bloggers. There seems to be a tendency about "Old Media" people to over-emphasize prestige at every turn. Sure, it's a common trend in many dimensions of life and many parts of the world. What's strange, though, is how dissonant that emphasis is with the philosophy of democratic communication that those "Old Media" types preach once they get online. Guess equality is just unevenly distributed.

Technorati tags: blog, opinionated, prestige, academics