DISQUS

Seth Finkelstein · 3 years ago

Bleh. "Blogs *good*, MSM *bad* - "Blogs *people*, MSM *corporate*".
How is this not at heart as repetitive as my simply saying "Bah, humbug"? It's the hoariest blog triumphalism.
ALL media is "made of people", in the sense that it's people communicating with one another. But the A-lister is no more a real person than the newspaper columnist. And sure, you can write stuff, but if you actually want to get HEARD, it's a very different story.
How many people hear him ranting, as opposed to hear me? Do you think that he has an enormous pile of money, and I don't, might have something to do with it? Just a little?
(someone will immediately straw-man this, to say that money is not the only factor - but it sure *iS* a factor!)

Mathew Ingram · 3 years ago

Obviously, money is a factor Seth -- and I don't think anyone, least of all me, would pretend that Mark Cuban would get just as much attention if he weren't a rich sports-team owner. But I think part of what his blog unique is that it isn't the kind of blog you would expect from a CEO or rich sports-team owner -- and in that sense he proves his own point, which is that blogs are a more direct conduit between a person who writes and their readers. Newspaper owners and TV networks don't tend to let people speak their mind in that way, or at least not often.

Seth Finkelstein · 3 years ago

Ah, but what is his point, when examined critically? It's rather uninspiring for a multimillionaire to be proclaiming how great it is that he can run a PR apparatus so much more cheaply these days. What is elided in the phrasing about "person who writes and their readers", is that there's still a conduit between readers and writers, in his case that conduit is the huge attention he has, by virtue of his wealth and ownership of attention-generating asserts. Those are major factors in *getting* him readers.

So he likes ranting instead of being a grey flannet suit. So what? Thus his wealth and connections get him an audience - that's not a triumph of blogs, it's triumph of wealth and connections.

The fallacy arises because of a false comparison between what it would entail if he had to use someone else's attention-network (a lot), versus what it costs him for incremental use *once he has gotten his own comparable attention-resources* (which represent an astonishing amount of bubble money).

Mathew Ingram · 3 years ago

That's a fair point as far as Mark Cuban is concerned, but then I already awarded you that point. But I think his argument holds for others as well, not just himself.

Seth Finkelstein · 3 years ago

Yes, I understood both "already awarded" and asserted "hold for others" point - my underlying point is contesting the latter, his argument does not generalize. Rather, generalizing his success is another way of stating cliched blog triumphalism. He's got's power because he's got power, and blogging gives very little unless one already has a lot (with some extremely rare exceptions).

Mathew Ingram · 3 years ago

I disagree (but then you probably figured that out already). I think his argument does generalize, because I don't see him arguing that anyone with a blog can somehow become as widely read or "powerful" -- whatever that means -- as he is. I see him as saying that blogs simply are more personal than traditional media, and therefore readers (however many there are) can form a more personal connection to a blogger than a member of the traditional media. And I think that is true.

Seth Finkelstein · 3 years ago

It's linked. He can AFFORD to be personal, in many senses. You're missing the aspect "Personal blogs don't get read by almost anyone else unless the person writing them has something comparable to the attention aspects of traditional media", hence the misleading comparison.