Friday, January 22, 2010

Blogs challenge behemoths

 [Supreme Court has now granted corporations the freedom to use unlimited money to support and oppose candidates and legislation of their choice…
With the rise of the multi-national corporation the nation-state has increasingly become an endangered species as these institutions are fluid and porous, being tied to no particular geography, and therefore becoming sovereign entities in their own right…
Perhaps instead of being citizens tied to a geography we will instead become share holders, members, or workers of corporations that form a new type of politics that we can scarcely imagine or understand within the framework of our current traditions and assumptions and where political conflict becomes some strange conflict among corporate entities attempting to maximize their share of the market and the resources…
Most fundamentally, however, when such powerful and wealthy groups control the flow of information, what gets heard, are capable of drowning everything else, or, at the very least, are capable of making us believe that all information is already contaminated and false, representing some disguised nefarious interest such that we can trust nothing, are capable of criminalizing forms of organization like unions, and when they control governmental representation, how is it possible to fight back in any meaningful way. Talk Me Off the Ledge from Larval Subjects by larvalsubjects]

[But here’s my question: is the Internet losing its sense of being a reflection of the views of society at large? Are many of those who blog and tweet (and I don’t just mean those sad losers who escape from their pathetic little lives by spending hours abusing other people on the net) beginning to believe that they constitute a secondary elite?
Thus, we have a bizarre situation where traditional media are criticized for fulfilling their role of appealing to mass audiences on the grounds that the programming does not appeal to a tiny minority on the Internet (and compared to TV audiences or newspaper readerships, the blogging elite is really tiny). Vir Sanghvi, HT HOME, BLOGS HOME]

Tiny blogs, nevertheless, will continue to challenge behemoths of all kind. [TNM]

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