copy of Middlemarch . And as for anything more demanding than an op-ed – like those thumb-suckers in the New Republic or the Weekly Standard – forget about it. Utterly hopeless. You might as well ask the reader to wade through the Tale of Genji ... in ancient Japanese. And so, with the bottomless maw of the World Wide Web yawning before us, the blog was born. Blogs encouraged interactivity, constituting the first, rudimentary form of social media to invade politics. Bloggers and their yammering audiences specialized in “hot takes” – blunt, incendiary, often fact- free expressions of opinions scrubbed of all nuance and qualification and dropped onto
First, American politics was overtaken by the blogs. I didn’t like them much, either. Until the first couple years of this century, the bulk of serious political discourse resided in print-on-paper (and primitively digital) newspapers and magazines, where a chin-pulling opinionator might feel free to spout off for 750 words – an average op-ed length – or compose a roomy feature in an “intellectual magazine” running on (and on) for half a dozen pages or more. But by 2002, thanks to the depredations of video games and 50 years of ubiquitous television-watching, the national attention span had shrunk to the point that an op- ed seemed as intimidating as an unopened
By Andrew Ferguson
TWITTER HAS TAKEN THE CENTER AND PUSHED IT TO THE MARGINS, WHILE THE EXTREMISTS ROLL IN TO OCCUPY THE EMPTY SPACE
American Consequences
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