“By most accounts, blogs — web logs to the uninitiated — scored a major coup last week when CBS News admitted that it couldn’t vouch for the authenticity of memos supposedly written by George W. Bush’s commander in the Texas Air National Guard. The conservative bloggers who led the charge against the CBS story were hailed as giant slayers. And yet it’s the blogging phenomenon itself that may need the last rites.
That may seem a strange thing to say, given the flattering coverage of blogs triggered by the CBS affair. But the media’s infatuation has a distinct odor of the deathbed about it — not for the blogosphere, which has a commercially bright future, but for the idea of blogging as a grass-roots challenge to the increasingly sanitized “content” peddled by the Time Warner-Capital Cities-Disney-General Electric-Viacom-Tribune media oligopoly….
Recently, however, I’ve watched the commercialization of this culture of dissent with growing unease. When I recently decided to take a long break from blogging, it was for a mix of personal and philosophical reasons. But the direction the blogosphere is going makes me wonder whether I’ll ever go back.
Even as it collectively achieves celebrity status for its anti-establishment views, blogging is already being domesticated by its success. What began as a spontaneous eruption of populist creativity is on the verge of being absorbed by the media-industrial complex it claims to despise….”
Read more at Blogging Sells, and Sells Out
