What does an American citizen do when, in the face of catastrophe, they cannot rely on their local, state or federal government?
When the failure of the levees devastated New Orleans, when the heckuvajob federal government only made matters worse, when the local and state government moved too slowly and with too much incompetence, something remarkable happened.
I've diaried before about Rising Tide 2 here and here. Rising Tide 2 is the second annual conference of NOLA bloggers and activists, and it's going to happen this weekend.
I read a remarkable story about the growth of the New Orleans blogosphere written by Mark Folse over at the Rising Tide Conference Blog (crossposted from his blog, Wet Bank Guide).
I highly recommend going over to the Rising Tide Conference Blog to read all of the posts; it's a fascinating display of what bloggers can do to make a difference.
I found Mark's post to be especially gripping. He begins by describing the difference between various kinds of blogs, while talking about an interview he recently did with local radio host and blogger Brian Denzer:
We spoke for a while of the place of blogging, and specifically of blogging as done by the people most involved in the Rising Tide 2 conference as it differs from much of what the public perceives as blogging: the often ridiculous comments beneath online newspaper stories and the facile wasteland of Facebook. Yes that is blogging in its most catholic sense, but it is not the work of the organizers listed in the sidebar of the Rising Tide 2 blog. Some of the core of the NOLA bloggers community offer a deeply personal journal of life in this city. Novelist Poppy Z. Brite's Dispatches from Tanginyika and local artist, almost attorney and grandmother Kim's Danger come to mind.
Mark goes on to show why and how the NOLA bloggers provide information in a way the traditional media cannot:
Blogging of the sort we perform (and radio as Brian presents it) is better suited to the story of New Orleans after the Federal Flood than any outlet in the major national or established local media. The scope and timeline of our story is novelistic, not episodic in the fashion most suited to the corporate subsidiry media of the twenty first century. The big media could no more cover the story we collectively write than they could serve up the serialized works of Dickens without being fileted and serve to their stockholders.
What is amazing is that after Katrina, when so many folks were exhausted and filled with despair, there arose individual bloggers, first writing to small groups of friends and then over time finding each other, meeting in meatspace, and doing work that no one else had even thought of, much less done, slowly gaining attention from folks across the nation as well as the traditional media.
Mark talks about how ordinary Americans began to re-knit the social fabric, a task that seemed beyond our present-day do-nothing government:
Because the larger social contracts--especially those that underpin our system of government-- were torn apart like the floodwalls by the forces of Katrin and the Federal Flood, New Orleans has been forced to examine this issue by necessity, to build new networks that enable us all to survive in a leaderless city and nation, or organize ourselves in the credit-card recovery, financed largely without government assistance or leadership and without the resources the more formal contracts with insurance companies promised.
I've probably quoted too much already, but it's hard to stop with a post this good.
Of course we need government. Not even a large group can rebuild infrastructure, schools, hospitals, all that. But what this group of bloggers have done in New Orleans impacts all of that as well, doing work that is brought to the attention of both traditional media and government representatives, building an infrastructure of ideas and solid information that can once again make government work the way it ought to work.
I will be following this conference as closely as I can; there'll be a lot of blogging at the Rising Tide Conference Blog.
I also ask anyone who feels this is worth supporting to donate to
Rising Tide 2 (the donate link is on the top of the page) and add $.01 to let them know that bloggers across the country are in solidarity with them. I have no doubt at all that what is discussed at this conference will benefit all Americans.
One day we won't have a leaderless nation. Hopefully one day soon.