On the Internet, nobody knows you're not an expert

So Salon's piece, "How the Internet Turned Everyone into James Carville," ran today, a mere two days after the NYT magazine ran "Fear and Laptops on the Campaign Trail."

The two kind of fused together in my head because they both reference the usual suspects of left-leaning web punditry -- the Daily Kos, MyDD -- and put forth the premise that the thousands upon thousands of pixels sacrificed to the egomaniacal whims of We Who Will Not Shut Up are changing both the nature of political campaigning and its subsequent mainstream coverage.

I have my problems with the NYT story -- it's not exactly breaking new ground with the idea that people prefer reading material that validates their preconceptions, and this nonsense about web loggers spanking traditional media on campaign and convention coverage ignores the apres-convention reviews (see some here and here, for starters) and the observation that without traditional media coverage, these folks wouldn't have so much to riff off of.

And I have my problems with the Salon story because it tries very hard to argue that a room full of a thousand monkeys typing will produce the Shakespeare-typing simian.

But the Salon story also raises a good point -- one that the NYT piece danced around -- about the vanishing barrier to entry for would-be professional political operatives:

Glenn Reynolds, the University of Tennessee law professor who runs the popular, right-ish blog Instapundit, notes that "if you look at a more general picture of the world recently, the difference between amateurs and professionals has vanished in a whole lot of ways. For instance, look at music -- it used to be you only knew about studio stuff if you were a serious musician; the amateur would never know about it. But now you can set these things up at home. The insider tricks aren't insider tricks anymore, now that outsiders have access to the knowledge." A similar thing has occurred in film and photography with the advent of digital imaging, or in journalism with the advent of the Web and of blogs themselves. Why should political strategy be any different?

And I thought this was worth remembering from Salon:

One problem with amateurs holding the tools of professionals, though, is that they may not quite understand how to use them.

Sometimes, there's a reason people are experts, you know? This is kind of backed-up in the closing lines of the NYT piece, in talking about the bloggers' adaptations for the GOP convention:

[The web loggers] had begun to work the way news people do at manufactured news events, by sticking together, sharing information, repeating one another's best lines.

It is not surprising that the online-only publication ran a better piece on the swarm of would-be pundits and media folks who are watching the presidential race. What does surprise me is the willingness to write the lede on the way to the ballpark. The election hasn't even happened yet. We don't know what role political-type web logs will play in it. Maybe we should sit on some of these questions until the results are in, then come up with an informed answer.

Comments

[Jackie Danicki]

I think they may have moved these stories forward in light of Rathergate - but perhaps that is giving them too much credit.

[Mike]

I enjoy watching the traditional media attempting to contend with the influence of weblogging. It's like watching the business world attempting to cope with the internet about six years ago -- they know it's going to be important, they know it has an influence, but since they can't be sure quite where or how, they're throwing themselves all over it just in case.

Plus, it's super fun to see pundits on CNN talking about the great stuff they're seeing in blogs. It reminds me of people I've run into at work who excitedly ask me if I've heard about all these great internet sites where people post stuff about the news.