Damn Vox Populi

It is not uncommon for bloggers or commenters to say things which irritate me profoundly. No doubt you have experienced the same thing. Here are some recent posts/comments which got in my craw.

First there's Scott Milfred's opinion piece from last weekend called "Tempt me with tickets, not an Overture Center bailout" at the WSJ which is, from my experience typical of folks you complain about the beleaguered arts center.

"Just three shows -- that's all I've ever paid to see at the center.

So here's my point: I'm willing to give the financially-strapped Overture more of my money for tickets to shows I actually want to see."

Here's what he's paid to see: Clifford the Big Red Dog (for his young child), Wilco, and Ryan Adams.

Great. Just what Madison needs – another venue for fucking indie rock. Lord knows there just aren't enough of those in town. I take that back. Not just any old indie rock band will do as Kicksville found out back in November as they played to a couple dozen people at the Capitol Theatre. Nothing less than the Pitchfork-Approved Parade of Hits will do, apparently. Maybe, just maybe, all the Scott Milfreds in this town could find it in themselves to be a little more adventurous and try to cultivate tastes that are slightly more eclectic than that of a dead amoeba.

I'm not going to hold my breath, though.

There was much to be irritated about when the Madison Beer Review posted "A Comment on Kathleen Falk's Alcohol Initiative" which contained this ditty regarding the county supervisor's attempt to bring people together to combat our fair state's "culture of alcohol":

I'm not sure what's worse. The fact that the commission exists at all. Or, maybe it's the fact that the commission consists entirely of "nurses, teachers, alcohol and drug counselors, school counselors, administrators, local officials, religious leaders, business people, activists and community organizers." Or, maybe it's the fact that the opinion of these people actually means anything.. (Emphasis theirs.)

Now, I'm not in favor of prohibition, but I have to question just how deep an alliance people looking for sanity in dealing with issues such as drunk driving want to make with someone who maintains that a blogger's opinion on the matter is inherently more meaningful than that of alcohol counselors. Why are the opinions of community members about an issue affecting the community meaningless? What does it take for a citizen of Dane county to have a "legitimate" opinion on the matter? Presumably MBR would not question whether or not the opinion of a Dane County resident is meaningful if he or she agreed with MBR.

The post continues:

I've said it before, and I'll say it again (though, I suspect it's sort of like banging my head against the wall, or Stockholm Syndrome - if the abuse continues long enough maybe I'll come to like it) the problem isn't the weapon, it's the user. Guns don't fire themselves. The weapon itself, without a moron to pick it up, load it, turn off the safety, point it at someone else, and pull the trigger, is not a particularly good bludgeon.

Likewise, alcohol, in and of itself, is not a societal ill. Or rather, the discussion that alcohol is, in and of itself, a societal ill, is a completely separate discussion. For now, we operate under the idea that, absent abuse, we have no problems with alcohol. So, we start from the premise that there is no need to ban alcohol. While we tolerate its regulation (don't want any funny stuff going on) we don't ban it completely. (Emphasis theirs.)

Plato would be proud to read MBR ask us to consider the perfect form of alcohol - a colorless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars. But so what? That's not the issue here. Falk's efforts aren't concerned with the perfect form but rather with the shadows on the cave wall – the intoxicating effect it has on certain carbon-based life forms. Am I supposed to feel sorry for an inanimate liquid which that big baddie Kathleen Falks seeks to punish? The correct starting point is not that alcohol is "innocent" but that people drink too much and get behind the wheel. Anything that exists in a vacuum away from human beings is harmless to them a priori. Landmines are harmless in some imaginary world where there are no people, but in this world there are people who die because of them long after governments halt their wars. The nature of alcohol in and of itself is irrelevant here. The problem at hand has two components to it - alcohol and people – which are indivisible.

The final person I'll mention here is Chuck who left some comments at a couple posts by Paul Soglin concerning the fates of newspapers.

Trying to shore up newspapers in the wake of the Internet seems a bit like trying to rescue Budweiser in the wake of the microbrew revolution.

Does the company that holds nearly 50% of the beer market is this country really need rescue? I hate to break this to Chuck but the microbrew revolution has affected a very small number of people.

I relish the fall of the ivory tower of newspapers in the same way I hope to see the Overture center collapse. Officially approved institutional news, opinions and culture are not the voice of our democracy or our[sic] and they never have been, they're just the easiest thing to find for people that can't be bothered to care.

First, I take issue with the notion of there being a single "voice of our democracy" which is inherently pure and good. Secondly, I take issue with the idea that this nebulous "voice of democracy" would exclude reporters that work for the mainstream media and that the Madison incarnation of this voice excludes groups such as the Madison Theatre Guild and the Madison Symphony Orchestra and their respective work. This is pseudo-populist bullshit. Simply not being the member of a large news gathering organization doesn't mean that your voice is worth listening to. (Neither does reporting under the imprimatur of a paper guarantee quality either.)

The idea that information needs to be orderly and vetted and from some central source is an artifact of a bygone age when information cohesion and distribution was prohibitively expensive.

People do the investigations and the reporting, and the newspapers pay them part of what it's worth, minus the huge legacy costs of doing business the old fashioned way. News aggregation sites can provide far more visibility than a print journal at a fraction of the hassle and cost.

Every day, we are more in a world where the people who know and care the most about any particular idea or event can make their minds available to the entire world instantly, freely and for free, and the people who care to listen or read can find them.

What's so good about an information free-for-all? And why is vetting so bad? How is the "voice of democracy" to be heard when it is scattered in an electronic diaspora and can only be reassembled by those who have access to computers and a lot of time to go tracking down websites and judging their reliability? It's one thing to tell a well-heeled old fart that they're just going to have to get used to getting their news online, but it's another thing to tell a member of the working poor in this community that, in addition to working a couple low wage jobs and trying to tend to their families, that they have to shuffle off to the library so they can get on the Internet and surf for hours to find the news.

After watching Bill Moyers Journal this past weekend and see a segment about Seattle Times reporters digging through mounds of data about pork barrel spending, I wondered if people who know and care about this issue will be able to spend months and hire the services of accountants or other experts to examine reams of numbers and make sense of it all. Will individuals be able to fly into war zones to report on conflicts and then post their experiences for free? There's more to reporting than simply making your mind available for free over the Internet. News aggregation sites are indeed great but people still have to do the reporting, they still have to go places and gather information.

None of this is to be a cheerleader for news organizations as they are today. But to say that we'll enter a utopian news age once newspapers disappear is absurd.