Blogging and the Mainstream Media

I've always felt the point of the blogger was to call out the mainstream media--to keep it honest, if it were.

In the early days of the American Revolution, ideas were conveyed through pamphlets. Thomas Paine's Common Sense spread the ideas of a bunch of Enlightenment era lawyers and philosophers we collectively call our Founding Fathers. I'm not sure whether Paine had fame or genuine fervor on his mind but sometimes the lines blur and he wanted to be read at any rate; nowadays every blogger wants to be read.

Fame or fervor? Sometimes it's difficult to separate the two, but I daresay each of us would be secretly thrilled for our own fifteen minutes (or five, as the case may be) of fame.

It's no different than any writer, despite how he/she might say that he/she writes only for himself/herself. Everyone writes foremost to assuage that obsessive part that clamors for expression and then for an audience, in that order.

In these days, the mainstream media is increasingly beholden to corporate interest and mutes its perspective based on sponsorship. This is the reason blogging sprung up--a feeling of disenfranchisement--that the popular sentiment was being obscured by ads, all of which seemed for a time to display white text on a red background. Take a look at any popular periodical and you'll notice that at least half of it is comprised of advertising.

But I am saying nothing that any blogger wouldn't. I think you'd find the same shared sentiment.

I wish I were wise enough to wonder whether blogging will become the fourth estate. As it is now, internet blogging is wide open but the key is networking. That is something the individual blogger does not have--name recognition. And name recognition comes with advertising. Maybe there is no way to avoid it and maybe it's a necessary evil. I haven't quite made my mind up on the subject.

And I find that the more people I meet, the more variations of the same topics and subjects I find. So clearly there are a lot of us with the same general concepts. I see arguments over semantics, but mostly I find variations on a theme. Occasionally I will find people with individual experiences that really cause me to take a long hard look and thought.

Maybe this is what has been muted over time by the mainstream media, which now has a tendency to think in lockstep and according to its monetary interests. The personality. The soul of the revolutionary.