On Not Being An Ultra-Identifiable Elitist Group
Jay corrects my interpretation of something he wrote in his Wesley Clark notes:
One, if you were there I'm sorry I didn't see you and talked to you. And two, it is probably a good thing that bloggers are not some ultra-identifiable elitist group. I hope that blogging is something that every person can get into and appreciate, or at least find useful. Just like "people who read a newspaper" are not a subclass, I don't think bloggers should be either.
What I read in Jay's sentence—specifically the phrase “it's hard to tell us [bloggers] apart from the rest of the people”—was that people at a news event won't be able to "play to the camera" or to the microphone because the technology in terms of recording will probably be too small anyway and the people taking notes and then blogging will look like regular people. (Regular as in not professional journalists, who, if you're pedantic enough, you might assume I think are somehow irregular.)
My interpretation of what he initially wrote was that in the future, whether or not bloggers should be an identifiable subclass, they will be—bloggers will divide people into subclasses just as the mainstream media does, just you watch. The point I thought Jay was trying to make was that you wouldn't know they were bloggers by looking at them. That has implications for how people comport themselves in public, since everything is blogworthy. That's not necessarily a bad thing: weblogs will introduce accountablitity to where it was not, and even though politicians will always have to be "on", that also means what they say will reach a potentially wider audience.
