Blogs: Get over ourselves!

At a time where everyone in the blogosphere is patting themselves on the back for Memogate or the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth or whatnot, there's a very good piece in the New York Observer today by Tom Scocca that skewers blogging and brilliantly.

About a month and a half ago, I was interviewed by a Ryerson student about blogging. While I confessed to loving blogs and enjoying having one most of the time, I urged him to take people who say that the blogs are revolutionary or democratize the media with a grain of salt. There is, after all, a tendancy among people to overestimate the power and influence of new media, to believe that they will save the world or ruin it.

I thought that this was common sense, a reasonable bit of tempered enthusiasm. But at the end of the interview, the student told me that I was the most pessimistic of all the bloggers and journalists he had spoken to.

The worst thing is that if Bush wins the next election, you just know there's going to be a Hurricane Jerry of articles about how bloggers beat Kerry. Then, just you wait, it'll become enshrined in books and passed down from generation to generation, the way the myth that television defeated Nixon in 1960 is.

Do you folks even remember Howard Dean? Get over ourselves, blogosphere!