Comments on: The Useless Iconoclast http://snarkmarket.com/2009/4018 The stomping grounds of Tim Carmody, Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson. It's a long-running conversation about media, journalism, technology, cities, culture, design, books, music, movies, the future and the past. Fri, 10 Feb 2012 01:58:56 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 By: Tim Carmody http://snarkmarket.com/2009/4018/comment-page-1#comment-6959 Tim Carmody Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:46:08 +0000 http://snarkmarket.com/?p=4018#comment-6959 I should clarify: there are some reasons why bloggers don't fall into this trap more often, not that they don't fall into it. Again, pageviews or the ideological need for fake contrarianism can make you recycle old CW as the new daring iconoclasm. See <a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/josh/" rel="nofollow">this series on "Three Paradoxes of the Internet Age,"</a> for instance... I should clarify: there are some reasons why bloggers don’t fall into this trap more often, not that they don’t fall into it. Again, pageviews or the ideological need for fake contrarianism can make you recycle old CW as the new daring iconoclasm. See this series on “Three Paradoxes of the Internet Age,” for instance…

]]> By: Tim http://snarkmarket.com/2009/4018/comment-page-1#comment-6958 Tim Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:40:43 +0000 http://snarkmarket.com/?p=4018#comment-6958 Is this a disease of politics, journalism, or both? I'm leaning journalism -- when folks strike this pose in politics, it's usually to get journalists to write about them. And you certainly see it in stories well outside of politics. Ron Rosenbaum had an article about Hannah Arendt that was dishonest in just this way; there was also an NYT op-Ed on teacher education with the same sins, amplified even. It's strange that print journalists fall for this style of writing/unthinking as or even more often than bloggers, who are dependent on pageviews and who don't have editors to point out that they've missed a wellknown chunk of the story. I think it has something to do with 1) print journalists trying to meet deadlines and 2) bloggers' need to build a brand by establishing their credentials over time. They don't need to bet it all on one allegedly paradigm-shifting article. Someone like Ezra Klein not only wouldn't write this; they wouldn't need to write this. Sadly, academics make the same mistake. Everyone is always radically challenging a straw-man consensus that doesn't exist, always speaking truth to power (where power is a literary critic who died eighty years ago). The rhetoric of risk, carefully deployed so as to actually risk nothing, ever, not a single live idea. Is this a disease of politics, journalism, or both? I’m leaning journalism — when folks strike this pose in politics, it’s usually to get journalists to write about them. And you certainly see it in stories well outside of politics. Ron Rosenbaum had an article about Hannah Arendt that was dishonest in just this way; there was also an NYT op-Ed on teacher education with the same sins, amplified even.

It’s strange that print journalists fall for this style of writing/unthinking as or even more often than bloggers, who are dependent on pageviews and who don’t have editors to point out that they’ve missed a wellknown chunk of the story. I think it has something to do with 1) print journalists trying to meet deadlines and 2) bloggers’ need to build a brand by establishing their credentials over time. They don’t need to bet it all on one allegedly paradigm-shifting article. Someone like Ezra Klein not only wouldn’t write this; they wouldn’t need to write this.

Sadly, academics make the same mistake. Everyone is always radically challenging a straw-man consensus that doesn’t exist, always speaking truth to power (where power is a literary critic who died eighty years ago). The rhetoric of risk, carefully deployed so as to actually risk nothing, ever, not a single live idea.

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