The Internet and Your Anonymous Best Friends

Michael Kinsley has an amusing post today about what the internet has become.  Yes, it's as anonymous as you want it to be, but it's also intensely personal.  Sometimes both.  Take your pick.

Update:  Hmmm.  Michelle Malkin doesn't think Kinsley's piece is funny at all.  She thinks he's trying to denigrate the internet.  Probably so.  Malkin writes:

With an explosion of dynamic investigative work, opinion writing, and news-based social networking going on across the web--from TPMMuckraker on the left, to the milblogs, to the War on Terror and conservative blogs policing the make-it-up media, to Power Line's new forum, to Pajamas Media--why is it that Kinsley can't find anything better to write about than some random MySpace page and Twitter.com?

Well, yes, Kinsley did ignore the powerhouse that the internet has become.  I assumed that it was in the pursuit of his story about the amusing remote corners of the internet -- which are there as well.

I saw the fate of the print media written clearly in the microcosm of this website's traffic this week.  One of my pieces was reprinted by the Chicago Sun-Times, and I had a modest boost in traffic.  It was also linked by a few popular websites, some of which I'd never heard of before, and traffic went crazy.

Granted, it's a lot easier for someone who's already on the internet to just click a link than it is for someone to put down a newspaper and go to their computer for more information, but I still see that the response from the internet was dramatic.  Those readers of my piece in the newspaper were at a disadvantage. They couldn't quickly jump on the internet to verify my factual claims, check out what others have written on the same subject, leave their own comment, or research something that interested them.

Because of the speed and depth that the internet allows, readers of internet news and blogs are rapidly becoming much better informed than print readers.  Plus -- need I remind you -- the internet is free. 

I'm beginning to feel sorry for the print media.  Their days are numbered.  I still enjoy reading the daily newspaper over lunch, irritating and left-leaning though it often is.  When the newspapers are gone from daily life, I will miss them.

Comments

[Sterling Ambivalence]

So Michelle Malkin thinks the man who launched and ran Slate.com for six years hates the internet. That he doesn't understand how powerful the internet has become.

The wrongness of that conclusion is just mind-boggling.

[Gina Cobb]

In fairness, Malkin didn't write that Kinsley "hates the internet." She wrote that he is "sneering at it" and ignoring some of its most important aspects:

"With an explosion of dynamic investigative work, opinion writing, and news-based social networking going on across the web--from TPMMuckraker on the left, to the milblogs, to the War on Terror and conservative blogs policing the make-it-up media, to Power Line's new forum, to Pajamas Media--why is it that Kinsley can't find anything better to write about than some random MySpace page and Twitter.com?"

Malkin is also well aware of Kinsley's internet history. She referred to him as "the once-pioneering Web journalist."