blackrimglasses.com

I’m sick of them.

Steve Gillmor is guilty. He’s guilty of debasing blogging into the same bait-switch mentality that plagues traditional media, and waters it down to polemic statements rather than anything resembling cogent analysis. “Is Dead” posts are the most simplistic form of link-baiting that exists, even more so than Top 10 lists. They simplify what should be complex arguments down into a binary juxtoposition of something that is supposedly alive vs. something that in the authors opinion is not.

But guess what: nothing dies. That’s right. Death is an arbitrary concept both physically and conceptually.

The Blogosphere likes things dying. According to Google Blogsearch (because Technorati is lame and didn’t want to include “is” in the search) the following have died:

TV
Cursive
The Vibe
The “reform” movement
Conservatism Without God

and evidently

Sirius Black (who knew?)

The most egregious offenses in this regard of course come from tech bloggers, who like making binary pronouncements as a way of standing on their sand-pile and saying “mine!” They also are a good way to get a lot of traffic, because there is nothing people like more than to read exactly why someone might go on record as pronouncing TV as dead. Binary opinions are easy to understand, easy to polarize an audience with, and easy to generate both positive and negative reaction with.

The problem is: they don’t work in terms of a cogent argument. That’s right. They don’t.

Lets take a look at todays “is dead” TV is dead.

Gillmor writes a lot about why TV is dead, with such amazingly thought out statements like “TV is dead because of the Internet.” The thing about television, newspapers, the music industry or media in general, and the dangerous things about pronouncing its demise is that the relationship between media, culture and populace is extremely complicated, and more complicated by the Internet, not less complicated. Binary comparisons (alive/dead) suppose that a new media simplifies the relationship of old media to the populace and its consumption of culture. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

The Internet is an amorphous concept which since its inception (talking the 70′s here) has served to solidify an infrastructure which makes commodity the concept of distance and time. To put this another way: the Internet changed the value exchange of data infrastructures from being temporal-spatial to being quantitative based on information.

This is an important concept: the concept of the Internet brought a shift from a temporal/spatial culture to an information culture.

That is what the Internet did.

The Internet did not kill anything.

The Internet has let them be reborn.