The Blogosphere and Solzhenitsyn
Two days ago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn died. Having read his Gulag Archipelago recently, my immediate reaction was sadness for the loss of a champion. A dissident in the Soviet as well as The West, he always strived for a more enlightened debate.
Today, I read an excellent article in OpenDemocracy called Russia: Ideology becomes a mash-up, which covers how the Russian blogosphere reacted to Solzhenitsyn’s death.
I recommend anyone interested in the development of new media to read it. A few quotes:
The internet may have given us the infinite world of hyperlinks but only at the cost of well-documented footnotes, which regularly fall through the infinite cracks of online conversations. Yet history without footnotes is a mere black-and-white parody of itself; it’s a history without subtlety, great for propaganda but useless for serious inquiry.
In the blogosphere, arguments never end, they only acquire new hyperlinks. To win in most battles that take place in the Russian cyberspace, one simply needs to have access to a bottomless reservoir of statistics and a mastery of italicised fonts: how many people really died in Ukraine’s Holodomor, how many wars the US really started, how many Albanians really disappeared in Kosovo, how much money the Yeltsin government really wasted. Maps, budgets, photos, scanned pages of the original manuscripts - it’s all out there at your disposal, to help you cook the greatest historical soup of all times: your customized version of world history, downloadable directly to your shiny iPod.
A great article by Evgeny Morozov which also wrote this good write-up of the Citizen Media Summit in Budapest June 2008
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there’s no thumbs up asci symbol so consider this a thumbs up… on message… I see this with american politcal blogs like DailyKos and the huffington press. It’s a whole new level of subjectivity with new risks, yet, it’s much better then a few key players controlling the debate and “pretending” to be objective.
On a side note, it’s going to be absolutely fascinating to see how the government controlled “fourth estate” and the absolutely uncontrollable “new estate” of outsiders visiting beijing play off one another. Chinese media seems to have been very adept at keeping on message within china but it seems impossible and improbably that that some major rifts will not be visible.
For example I watched a just bit of the opening cermony and NBC’s obsession with the little boy who survived the earthquake (he came in holding Yao Ming’s hand) bordered on absurd. It seemed almost like an obtuse attempt to coordinate a message or agenda between china and NBC. On whatever lever a collaboration on setting a narative. I found it very creepy. The announcer spent several minutes doing nothing but telling and re-telling a set of “on narrative talking points” about this kid.