Watching the reaction to tonights polls has set me to thinking about blogging and the blog culture. I can't honestly say that I wasn't a little disturbed that the Washington Post/ABC poll didn't upset me a little. It did. But it certainly didn't evoke the kind of existential despair I noted in a couple of other entries. Nor did it elicit a desire in me for the halcyon days of Dean (or Clark) when men were men and women were women and we were going to really beat George W. Bush, dammit.
What has upset me more than these polls, though, is the ideologically blinkered reaction to them
that we have here, on a blog, this "new media" dealie, where we're supposed to be above the
herd-like instincts that drive the printies and the televidiots. We seem to fall into three camps instinctively, with any news:
Camp 1) Bush is toast. He's tanking.
Camp 2) Dammit, we should have nominated Dean. He was definitely going to beat Bush. I could tell because he was very loud about it.
Camp 3) Hmm. Not great news. Not terrible news. We'll have to wait and see.
That these should be the camps is to be expected. They represent distillations and simplifications of the various possible outcomes of the coming election...many details suppressed of course.
What is distressing to me, though, is how little movement there is between camps. News stories activate the same core of posters, depending on which Camp they cohere with. There is little to no "convincement" that particular ideas are correct. There is only validation of pre-existent biases, activation of solidified constituencies.
This is the media-herd mentality, in hypertext. We castigate the media sheep for failing to investigate propositions and for merely presenting contending claims without evaluating them.
Are we really doing better?