Newsgroup: it.cultura.fantascienza
Titolo: Orwell, i pamphlet e i blog

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/10/arts/10TANK.html?todaysheadlines

 
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/10/arts/10TANK.html?todaysheadlines
Qualche riga di spiegazione per chi legge questo offline niente? 
-- 
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
homepage: 
http://www.fantascienza.net/sfpeople/elethiomel
English blog: 
http://annafdd.blogspot.com/
Blog in italiano: 
http://fulminiesaette.blogspot.com

 Qualche riga di spiegazione per chi legge questo offline niente?
Detto fatto:
The Ancient Art of Haranguing Has Moved to the Internet
By EMILY EAKIN
"The pamphlet is a one-man show," observed George Orwell approvingly. "One
has complete freedom of expression, including, if one chooses, the freedom
to be scurrilous, abusive and seditious; or, on the other hand, to be more
detailed, serious and `highbrow' than is ever possible in a newspaper or in
most kinds of periodical."
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But Orwell, who pamphleteered on behalf of unpopular leftist causes, was not
optimistic about the genre's prospects in an era dominated by newspapers
devoted to what he perceived as an increasingly narrow range of mainstream
opinion. "At any given moment there is a sort of all-prevailing orthodoxy, a
general tacit agreement not to discuss some large and uncomfortable fact,"
he lamented in 1948.
It seems Orwell may have been underestimating contemporary society. If he
had lived to surf the Internet, for example, he might have been cheered to
discover a flourishing new breed of pamphleteer: the blogger. Like its
ink-and-paper antecedent, blogging is quick and cheap. Anyone with access to
a Web site can post a weblog (or blog) linking readers to other online
sources and promoting all manner of original opinion — serious, scurrilous,
seditious and otherwise.
Today, according to Cameron Marlow, a doctoral student in electronic
publishing at the Media Lab at M.I.T. and the creator of a weblog index,
Blogdex, the number of blogs — liberally defined — has probably passed the
half-million mark. That's up from just a few dozen five years ago, a spike
that blog watchers say owes much to the events of Sept. 11, which spawned a
whole new subgenre: the war blog. And while most online harangues presumably
lack the public profile and scathing eloquence of history's most redoubtable
pamphleteers (a typical passage from one of Milton's famous antiprelatical
tracts, for example, refers to the Anglican church service as "the
new-vomited paganism of sensual idolatry"), some bloggers, including the
neoconservative journalist Andrew Sullivan, (Andrewsullivan .com), and Glenn
Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee (InstaPundit.com),
routinely draw more than 20,000 visitors a day and get cited by the
mainstream press.
But the surest sign that blogging is no longer just a para-journalistic
phenomenon is academic recognition: this fall, the Graduate School of
Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley is inaugurating a
course that uses weblogs to investigate current debates over intellectual
property.
"We wanted to explore a serious issue using a novel medium, " said Paul
Grabowicz, director of new media programming at the school and a co-teacher
of the course. "When you have journalists sitting down to write a weblog,
what happens to objectivity? Obviously, a weblog is far more interactive. It
starts to mix journalists and their sources together. Then you have those
people responding to postings on weblogs: What do you do with those?"
The war on terrorism may be giving new life to the old-fashioned pamphlet as
well. This winter, "9-11," a stinging indictment of American foreign policy
packed into a 125-page, pocket-size pamphlet by the M.I.T. linguist Noam
Chomsky, became a best seller in five countries, setting a new sales record
for the Open Media pamphlet series published by Seven Stories Press. Begun
during the Persian Gulf war in 1991 by a pair of Rutgers University
graduates hawking Xeroxed copies of an antiwar tract on New York City street
corners, the Open Media pamphlets now appear as glossy bound little books on
hot-button topics — terrorism, the Middle East, civil liberties — by
scholars like the radical historian Howard Zinn.
And now Open Media has some competition: the Prickly Paradigm Press, a
scholarly pamphlet series begun by a pair of British anthropologists in 1993
as the Prickly Pear Press and recently revived by the American
anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. Mr. Sahlins raised money from friends and
family to take over the series and convinced the University of Chicago Press
to act as its distributor.
To celebrate its new incarnation, the renamed Prickly Paradigm is issuing
five 50-page polemics this month on subjects ranging from the West's
relationship to war to the unlikely affinities between left-wing cultural
studies scholars and libertarian Wall Streeters. In "War of the Worlds: What
About Peace?," Bruno Latour, a French theorist, argues that to achieve world
peace the West must first acknowledge that it has long been at war, albeit
covertly, a war masquerading as the "peaceful extension of Western natural
Reason" to "the many Empires of Evil."
Other pamphlet writers reserve their ammunition for particular academic
disciplines. In "Waiting For Foucault, Still," Mr. Sahlins tackles the
theoretical excesses of anthropologists. In "New Consensus for Old: Cultural
Studies From Left to Right," the critic Thomas Frank does the same for the
field of cultural studies. By the 1990's, Mr. Frank contends, facile "cult
stud" arguments about the "subversive potential" of a television sitcom or
the "counter-hegemonic" impact of shopping malls had come to look
uncomfortably like the market populism promoted by the pro-business right:
both groups appear to equate consumerism with democratic self-expression.
Then there is Deirdre McCloskey's "Secret Sins of Economics." Ms. McCloskey,
a professor of economics, history and English at the University of Illinois
at Chicago, accuses her colleagues of producing endless thoerems and
statistics that have nothing to do with the real world. "Imagine that
instead of doing economic history about English agriculture in the 13th
century, you were to do an economic history about an imaginary place," Ms.
McCloskey explained in a telephone interview. "What would be the point of
that? An economics department ought not to be about speculation and
hypothetical worlds."
Of course, in today's media-saturated environment, these latest endeavors
can hardly expect to sway opinion the way the pamphlet did in its glory
days, the 17th and 18th centuries, when master rhetoricians like Milton,
Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift and Thomas Paine regularly swamped the public
sphere with two-penny treatises on burning social issues. (Published in
January 1776, Paine's "Common Sense" sold half a million copies within a few
months and is credited with transforming untold numbers of ambivalent
colonists into ardent revolutionaries.)
Ms. McCloskey said she had jumped at the chance to write a pamphlet for
Prickly Paradigm when Mr. Sahlins, an old poker-playing friend, asked her to
contribute. "We really need some place between the formal journal article —
mainly used for academic promotion — and the book,"she said.
But she confessed that she doubted whether her pamphlet would have much of
an impact on her discipline. "I ought to have called myself Cassandra," she
said ruefully. "I'm a student of the rhetoric of economics. You'd think that
a student of that would realize that people aren't persuaded just because
you have the correct argument."
Puo' bastare? ;-)
Cia',
Selene

 Puo' bastare? ;-)
E' molto carino per quelli che non vogliono farsi la subscription al
NYT. Pero' dovrei leggerlo meglio per capire se dice qualcosa di nuovo
sulla blogsphere o se e' una nuova variazione di "Ho scoperto una cosa
meravigliosa! Se metti una pentola piena d'acqua su un fornello, diventa
molto piu' piacevole lavarsi e se ci metti del cibo dentro, cambia e
diventa piu' morbido!"


cibo dentro, cambia e diventa piu' morbido!"
Ah si', tipo il servizio del TG2 sugli "squilli" al cellulare.
Byez
un DeK scostumato
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