Phil Agre apologizes:
I’m sorry that RRE has been quiet for so long. I’ve been writing.
I guess I sat out the war. I put a lot of effort into the last couple
of wars, so I ended up having to let everyone else cover this one.
In any case I’ll be back.
Earlier this week William Gibson made blog-news by announcing that he was stopping blogging so that he could write. Heath wonders: ‘Has “no longer doing a blog” become the new “starting a blog” already?’
Even though Agre’s Red Rock Eaters News Service looks more like a mailing list, it’s in the same ecosystem as blogs. I’ll choose this apparent pattern (which is probably mere coincidence) to go off a bit on a personal peeve: as news is ever more ubiquitous, analysis is disappearing. In fact, not only is its proportion less, but one suspects that if one could quantify such things, that there might actually be less gross analysis as well. It’s no surprise that people who want to crank out some serious analysis have to cut themselves off from the hit-and-run style.
Actually, despite the tendency of most instantaneous coverage of anything to be blathering (from playoff sports commentary to retired generals), Phil Agre has done a remarkable job of filtering through news around major past events; I was glued to his updates after September 11th, as he and his network of readers pay attention to all kinds of interesting sources.
What’s my point? Who knows?