Don't read this: No-one pays me to write it

I was browsing through the Blogosphere in Sunday’s Turbine looking, as usual, to see if my own Blog was mentioned, and, as usual, it was all the usual Irish bloggers that got a mention. I was begining to think that maybe all those bloggers that they mention week in week out were Turbine bloggers who wanted to say stuff that they couldn’t put their own names to because of the country’s Draconian libel laws, much like the cogair website from the early days of the world wide web.

I think the word Draconian is a bit redundant these days, by the way, and if the Republic of Ireland was at the centre of civilisation instead of being a tiny peripheral country that most people aren’t aware even exists then the word McDowellian would be far more apposite.

Anyway, after yesterday I think those bloggers are probably just people like myself, who according the nearest thing Ireland has to a Liberal paper, are “annoyed people with time on their hands who might otherwise be pasting letters from magazines into weird and threatening letters – or be gainfully employed”. Ouch! Feel the condesencion. It’s not that much of a shock to me as the Turbine has been getting noticably snootier over the last while, complaining about scangers, scobies and the like, but not in a tongue-and-cheek Ross O Carroll Kelly way. Perhaps it’s dawned on them after reading about themselves in Wikipedia, the open source encyclopedia that's also written by people with time on their hands, that it’s appeal is always going to be limited to people who live in places like Foxrock and therefore they have nothing to fear from insulting scobies, who they probably think aren’t able to get all the way through an article by Diarmuid Doyle anyway. This week Doyle, a supposed liberal made the astonishing claim that he thought it represented “inverted snobbery” for a middle-class student like Dermot Laide to be sent to jail just for murdering someone in cold blood. I suppose people called “Dermot” and derivatives thereof ought to stick together as in this country it’s a name only middle-class people are allowed have, though in the more egalitarian United States even Clitus the slack-jawed yokel was allowed call one of his kids by that name.

There’s got to more than mere class condesencion involved here though. You can sense in a lot of the coverage that bloggers get in the press both here and internationally a resentment that being able to mould opinion is no longer the exclusive prerogative of print journalists. This is nothing new. In the late nineties the Murdoch press was full of scare stories about how much porn was up there on the web, even though it’s only the same proportion as in print media, and the irony that Murdoch papers like The Sun did so much to normalise porn was obviously lost on them. Yesterday the Turbine printed another piece which was obviously lifted from the Independent on Sunday which argued that we live in a “relativistic” media world where the New York Times is on a par with the thrashiest blog. I'd love if that were true, but America’s soi-disant paper of record sells over a million copies daily, a figure that only sites like www.Moveon.org can even come close to, even though the Times constantly misled the American people over the existence of WMD in Iraq while it was one of those thrashy bloggers that exposed the fact that America’s dumb-ass president was being operated by remote control by his sinister svengali Karl Rove.

It’s certainly true that you can’t believe everything you read on the web. When I tell my girlfriend strange-but-through stuff like that the president of Turkministan renamed bread after his mum she asks me where I read that and I joke that it was on my own blog. But in an age where media press conferences are little more than photo-ops for George Bush, blogs have come around just when America needs them most. If the mainstream press are afraid of them, probably not nearly as much as the powers that be. When the printing press came along first the Catholic Church were terrified of it as before then they had a monopoly on interpreting the bible, after Gutenburg people were free to set up their own religions, many of them with even more outlandish beliefs, just as, regretably, many blogs are to the right of the Bush administration. But argument and debate things without which society becomes as sterile as Europe was in the Middle Ages.

I used to think that the reason civilisation was created in the first place was to allow the interchange of ideas which is why the centres of Ancient Athens and Rome were both known as the Forum. If people like Socrates were alive today he might well be on the internet trying to get people in places like Kansas to think for themselves and not believe everything that Fox News tells them, though if he was the Turbine would still be telling him to get a proper job.

But here’s some bad news. The people who control the issuing of domain names on the web, www.icaan.org are answerable to the US Treasury, who up till now have kept their noses out of their affairs. But last week the Bush-appointed treasury secretary expressly asked them not to create a new domain code, .xxx for porn sites as the his supporters think this will increase the amount of porn on the web, though people who actually understand how the web works think it will make it easier to filter. This could be the start of a slippery slope which sees Uncle Sam increasingly dictate what can and can’t be seen on the web. And not just in the land of the free, but right here in the people’s republic of McDowellisatan as well.