keithgessen:

And I have to say the Atlantic article caused me to experience what I can only define as blogger rage. This guy gets to put together a flimsy tissue of intellectual *associations* in a national magazine while I sit here in the basement, blogging, just because his half-conclusions flatter the prejudices of that magazine’s readers?

But then I ate some cookies and I thought: It’s ok. As a blogger I may also be asked by another national magazine, or even *the same national magazine*, to flatter the obverse side of the very same prejudices and tell those readers that in fact we’ve discovered this thing called the internet which is a magic pill that will solve all our problems if only we just tell that to ourselves often enough. And I felt better.

Seeing one of my favorite authors on the subject of this whole “internet discussion” defamed in this fashion causes me to experience a bit of “blogger rage” myself. With just the slightest due diligence, one discovers that the author of the article in question is Nick Carr, who has written two real books on the internet—and not just the sort of speculative “is it good or bad for culture?” stuff (although he’s got good observations about that as well), but serious books about the economic and business implications of new technology and the recent technical evolution of the medium’s infrastructure. He’s also been a blogger for almost as long as Gessen has had a literary journal and has been writing about these questions for a decade.

Not only that, but he does read and respond to his comments and is in an ongoing discussion with people like Clay Shirky and Kevin Kelly, among others, who have a lot of pretty interesting things to say about these matters. Certainly more than those who seem to think they’re the first ones to tackle them.

Just because someone brings a soft touch to the cover of The Atlantic doesn’t mean they’re a light weight. I don’t really understand what’s objectionable about his argument.

One great thing about this whole internet bit is that it should be able to elevate the level of conversations above insinuations that someone else isn’t as much of a real blogger.