The unannexable value of blogs as parish, not province…

On what by recent standards is a slow news day, Norm’s observation that the pessimism of some ‘progressive’ bloggers is entirely misplaced… Despite an impressive level of take up amongst the UK’s MSM they are still some way off ‘getting it’:

…they [the MSM] have not killed off the amateur blogosphere. Far from it. Think about it like this. If the only blogs were those attached to the mainstream media, blogging would have become an extension of the operations of those media. This would have been a real change of a kind – in making the mainstream media somewhat more open and various.

It put me in mind of Chris Agee’s first editorial in the first editon of the excellent Irish Pages magazine and his qualitative distinction between the parish and the province. The parish (as a unit of collective imagination) has a unique, vibrant and unreplicable life of its own, whilst the provincial merely apes the pretensions of whatever capital culture its in orbit to.

The best blogs are parishes, not provinces.

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