Wow. Peggy Noonan is pumping up blogs (from a journalism sense) like I don’t know what. And at the Wall Street Journal no less:
But when I read blogs, when I wake up in the morning and go to About Last Night and Lucianne and Lileks, I remember what the late great Christopher Reeve said on “The Tonight Show” 20 years ago. He was the second guest, after Rodney Dangerfield. Dangerfield did his act and he was hot as a pistol. Then after Reeve sat down Dangerfield continued to be riotous. Reeve looked at him, gestured toward him, looked at the audience and said with grace and delight, “Do you believe this is free?” The audience cheered. That’s how I feel on their best days when I read blogs.
That you get it free doesn’t mean commerce isn’t involved, for it is. It is intellectual commerce. Bloggers give you information and point of view. In return you give them your attention and intellectual energy. They gain influence by drawing your eyes; you gain information by lending your eyes. They become well-known and influential; you become entertained or informed. They get something from it and so do you.
It’s a great read, one that I think is pretty level headed and “spot on” about a lot of what’s happening right now. But we still have such a loooooonnnngggg way to go before we’ll see just what the long term effects are.
But this is why I believe that the technologies will change education. If the Fourth Estate is reeling a bit by the rise of citizen editors and the creation (in progress) of a new definition of journalism, I just feel like the same can happen to education. Like newspapers, we just don’t hold the keys to the content anymore. And I think we all better start waking up to that fact…
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