Sunday, August 11, 2002

The Ancient Art of Haranguing Has Moved to the Internet
Today, according to Cameron Marlow, a doctoral student in electronic publishing at the Media Lab at M.I.T. and the creator of a weblog index, Blogdex, the number of blogs — liberally defined — has probably passed the half-million mark. That's up from just a few dozen five years ago, a spike that blog watchers say owes much to the events of Sept. 11, which spawned a whole new subgenre: the war blog. And while most online harangues presumably lack the public profile and scathing eloquence of history's most redoubtable pamphleteers (a typical passage from one of Milton's famous antiprelatical tracts, for example, refers to the Anglican church service as "the new-vomited paganism of sensual idolatry"), some bloggers, including the neoconservative journalist Andrew Sullivan, (Andrewsullivan .com), and Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee (InstaPundit.com), routinely draw more than 20,000 visitors a day and get cited by the mainstream press.

But the surest sign that blogging is no longer just a para-journalistic phenomenon is academic recognition: this fall, the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley is inaugurating a course that uses weblogs to investigate current debates over intellectual property.

"We wanted to explore a serious issue using a novel medium, " said Paul Grabowicz, director of new media programming at the school and a co-teacher of the course. "When you have journalists sitting down to write a weblog, what happens to objectivity? Obviously, a weblog is far more interactive. It starts to mix journalists and their sources together. Then you have those people responding to postings on weblogs: What do you do with those?"

The war on terrorism may be giving new life to the old-fashioned pamphlet as well. This winter, "9-11," a stinging indictment of American foreign policy packed into a 125-page, pocket-size pamphlet by the M.I.T. linguist Noam Chomsky, became a best seller in five countries, setting a new sales record for the Open Media pamphlet series published by Seven Stories Press. Begun during the Persian Gulf war in 1991 by a pair of Rutgers University graduates hawking Xeroxed copies of an antiwar tract on New York City street corners, the Open Media pamphlets now appear as glossy bound little books on hot-button topics — terrorism, the Middle East, civil liberties — by scholars like the radical historian Howard Zinn.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/10/arts/10TANK.html

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