UPI’s James Bennett writes that blogging may force an information reformation (I say we go with “conjunction junction,” but then I’m in to kitsch…):

Bloggers and their readers may form only a small percentage of the Anglosphere populations, but they are typical “early adopters” — trendsetters and opinion leaders. The crossover between the blogs and mainstream media means that ideas, opinions and identified errors from blogspace will be reflected more and more in mainstream media, to the extent that they remain distinct things.

This writer feels much of academia and the media throughout the Anglosphere has come to resemble, in a way, the Church in Europe immediately before the Reformation. They have grown intellectually lazy, out of touch with the people they believe they exist to enlighten, and irrelevant to the needs they exist to serve. They have come to see their position, incomes and the respect of the public as entitlements due to them for their virtue, rather than earned by achievement.

The intellectual monopoly of the medieval Church was undermined by the advanced communication technology of the printing press. Printers and pamphleteers mushroomed throughout northern Europe, and the rapid and hard-to-control exchange of ideas their network enabled created the medium for new awarenesses and attitudes. Large parts of the old structure of the Church were overthrown and replaced; that which was left was greatly transformed by the Counter-Reformation.

Are these little Weblogs the harbinger of a similar reformation of the academia and media establishments of the Anglosphere? I wouldn’t count it out.

Well, everybody loves a favorable review… An interesting sidenote: ‘Tseems to me there’re a healthy number of decent bloggers involved with the academy in one way or another (or were, at one time or another), despite the intellectual laziness and bureaucratic veneer of many contemporary universities and university systems; perhaps we bloggin’ educators are trying — however obliquely — to worry established classroom and department orthodoxies right here in the ol’ ether?

Who knows. Could be we just like to post stuff.

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