mic check

Editor's Note : An unretirement is just that. Also, Johnny Hatchet's so-called other blog is stalling for bureaucratic reasons.

I've been reading blogs. Daily, I check The Wages of Win, an NBA alt-stat blog. Terrific. But even better is Sports Media Review, which is something like a one-man wrecking ball of sports media critique.

Given my readings, I'm worried that I'm going to become more, cough, extreme. That is, by filtering my readings to these blogs, especially the latter, I'm going to have the opinion that I began with - notably, sports mediamouths just don't get it, don't know how to properly evaluate athletes, and engage in discourse that reproduce racism. In fact, I've been feeling this extremism lately & I become increasingly upset by sports mediamouth talk.

Why am I worried about becoming more extreme? Well, I'm also reading articles on blogging. Last night, I read :

A 2004 article, by Cass R. Sunstein, a Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago, in which the good Professor worries that the filtering blogs allow for would do what I just described, & threaten democracy

But to the extent [emerging Internet technologies] weaken the power of general-interest intermediaries and increase our ability to wall ourselves off from topics and opinions we would prefer to avoid, they create serious dangers to democracy. (2004:59)

General-interest intermediaries - call them newspapers, old-media, whatever - benefit a democractic society because they impose content - &, thus, "diverse others" - that the audience might not have encountered otherwise. The ability to choose content & develop a personal "echo-chamber" through elobrate internet technologies - search engines, "my favorites" type online-lists, etc - will, ultimately, demolish this potential encounter with "diverse others."

Hmm. I accept that unexpected encounters with content & others are valuable. Very valuable. What I don't accept are two of Sunstein's premises :

(1) Filtering will eliminate unexpected encounters.
(2) Encounters with the "diverse others" of "general-interest intermediaries" serve a democractic function.

(1) Filtering will eliminate unexpected encounters.

"Watchdog"-type blogs & blogs dedicated to cultural criticism, such as the aforementioned Sports Media Review blog, point readers to incredibly diverse sources and articles. Granted, these sources are discussed through the writer's political & cultural lens, but (a) because of links, the reader has quick & immediate access to the "other" source & can evaluate it on his own & (b) many of us already believe that all discussions, narratives, articles, etc. come pre-packaged by the writer's or speaker's social position. Publishing "neutral" articles that "just report the facts" in "general-interest intermediaries" involve decisions about which facts to include & which to emphasize; moreover, given finite human & publishing resources, the decision to run any one article - say a "neutral" article about a certain crime committed by a particular person - requires that any number of "other" articles - say five, ten, fifteen other articles about certain criminal cases reported by all sorts of other people - go un-or-under-reported.

Which leads me to

(2) Encounters with the "diverse others" of "general-interest intermediaries" serve a democratic function.

In "Democracy and Filtering," Professor Sunstein pays lip-service to the "limitations and biases" of the media, writing

For all their problems, and their unmistakable limitations and baises, these intermediaries have performed some important functions.
People who rely on such intermediaries experience a range of chance encounters with diverse others, as well as exposure to material they did not specifically choose.

So what are these limitations and biases doing to the "diverse other" : well, more than one savvy reader of media & culture conclude that diverse others are deflated into stereotype & these stereotypes serve un-democratic ends.

Check : Woe is Us, Part 3,764 (more on that in the next blog entry).
Check : bell hooks' Black Looks, in which, amongst other, equally intense critiques of white culture, hooks describes the effects of encounters with "diverse others" on the selfhood of a young black girl

I was painfully reminded of this fact recently when visiting friends on a once colonized black island. Their little girl is just reaching that stage of preadolescent life where we become obsessed with our image, with how we look and how others see us. Her skin is dark. Her hair chemically straightened. Not only is she fundamentally convinced that straightened hair is more beautiful than curly, kinky, natural hair, she believes that lighter skin makes one more worthy, more valuable in the eyes of others. Despite her parents' efforts to raise their children in an affirming black context, she has internalized white supremacist values and aesthetics, a way of looking and seeing the world that negates her value.

Check : Ask white Americans about crime.

inConclusion, I can only hope that those readers uncomfortable and/or angry, upset, hurt by racism, by representations of race in the "general-interest media," get a little polarized by blogging, become a little more extreme, & develop communities dedicated to combatting these problems...

peace love gap
Johnny Hatchett