Many mumbling mavens in the moonlight

Bye-the-bye, Gentle Readers, I’ve just read a fascinating article by Jay Rosen about the, well, about a report (the second link on that page, at the moment anyway) about the media coverage about Trent Lott’s comments about the 1948 presidential election. Whew.

The thing I find interesting about Mr. Rosen’s article is the suggestion that the blogosphere can work better than a newsroom as an aggregation of experts. I’m not the only one to notice that a baseball fan with a non baseball related question can post it in Clutch Hits Primer Lounge, and be pretty likely to get an answer, another answer disagreeing with that answer, and likely a third giving more details. There are experts, or perhaps Mavens, on the American Civil War, on labor law, on a variety of computer topics, on beagles, on chemistry, on geography, and on hermeneutics, among other things.

So, when people saw the Lott remarks in newsrooms, the people there (a) knew what Lott was like, so didn’t think the segregationist element was that big a deal, and (2) didn’t know much about the 1948 election, in anything other than the vaguest of terms. When it got into the blogosphere, though, some people knew quite a bit about the 1948 election, and brought others up to speed. With the amount of historical info available on-line, this was pretty easy.

So, the journalists evidently didn’t recognize that the story was a story until after outraged blogizens had done the research and put it in context for them. On one level, that’s terribly depressing. On another, it may well be simply the nature of the Internet and the power of Mavens. If a small percentage—say, one in a thousand, or one in ten thousand—knows enough to put a topic in context, and the überblogs have thirty thousand or fifty thousand readers, they may well happen on the right Maven for a piece of information pretty darned often. Newsrooms don’t have that luxury, and have to substitute expensive and laborious research, which still won’t help them to recognize if there is anything there to research.

The Internet is, after all, an immense trivia machine. But not everything is trivial.

Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.