June 26, 2007 3:08 PM

Note to Paul Campos: The Medium Is Not the Message

Reading the Colorado papers for the last few years as part of my daily intake of news from the West, I've come to think of law professor Paul Campos as a solid columnist at the Rocky Mountain News. I generally really like his stuff, but I have to say, his piece today is somewhere between slightly and wildly ridiculous. The column is a winding, somewhat contradictory and at times unintelligible screed against blogs. While it starts out with a vague (and mildly admirable) attack on what I believe is Ann Althouse's blog (he leaves his first target unnamed), it then descends into a breathless, hysterical screed against the entire medium of blogs.

Painting with an offensively broad and stereotyping brush, Campos says that people who write blogs tend to "take pride in drawing attention to themselves by being aggressively obnoxious." He says that while academic work produced by academics like him face "comparatively little risk of making its author look like a narcissistic idiot," the "same can't be said for the chardonnay-fueled rant posted at three in the morning...about your living room decor, your psycho-sexual neuroses, and your views on the latest episode of American Idol" that he says those who write blogs are prone to.

Now, it's true - there are zillions of blogs outs there, and some - perhaps many - that fit Campos's description. But for an academic that likely takes pride in academic accuracy and study, it's more than a little absurd for him to be claiming the entire medium of blogs is guilty of the caricature he depicts. It's also more than a little hilarious that in attacking incoherent screeds he ends up authoring, well, a rather pristine example of an incoherent screed, somehow spending 90 percent of the column attacking the entire blog medium and then somehow concluding by saying "none of which is to deny that many bloggers, including many academic bloggers, do excellent work."

Campos's hackneyed criticisms, of course, are emblematic of similar criticisms made by many others in the traditional media world. Among many media elites, there exists a strange love-hate fascination with blogs. The love comes from writers and editors who see the potential of blogs and a democratized, grassroots, interactive media platform. The hate, I think, comes from those who see the blogs as a challenge to the traditional media's authority - a challenge from the masses that supposedly has no right to a voice in the Establishment's political debate. Thus, the over-the-top cliches like those Campos uses - all designed to portray those who write blogs as not entitled to the voice and the platform they are building for themselves.

But here's the thing: Railing on "the blogs" - rather than specific blog posts or blog writers - is as silly as railing on, say, "the telephone" or "the newsletter" or "the radio." You don't hear anyone saying "those damn telephoners are ruining politics and academia and the world as we know it!" do you? No, and if you did, you'd burst out laughing.

Similarly, you should burst out laughing when you hear pundits attack "the blogs." A blog, like the phone, or a newsletter or the radio, is just a medium - nothing more, nothing less. Trying to ascribe all sorts of crazy stereotypes to what is ultimately just software that allows users to easily post content to a website - well, that's just a foul mix of laziness and bitterness, and certainly undeserving of a normally very solid columnist's entire piece at a time this state and this nation has plenty of substantive issues that need our attention.