Corrente notes the end of the Bush-era political blog The Agonist and wonders what is happening to the once-dynamic, left-leaning blogosphere.
But I'm baffled. The original project of the blogosphere was to replace the media -- and not, pace the odoriferous Ezra Klein and the fragrant Matt Yglesias, become it, nor to mutate and devolve into a front organization for either of the two legacy parties, like Kos, Digby, et al.
And if anything, the media needs replacing more than ever. So WTF? Has FaceBorg sucked everything up? The Twitter? Neither can handle the long form, so is the long form dead? Naked Capitalism lives by the long form, so I'd say the long form is alive. Is political blogging dead? Has a younger generation moved on? WTF?
The election(s) of Obama divided progressives horribly and the long form blog is hard to sustain without some incentive, such as bone-numbing fear of large numbers of Neocon fools directing foreign policy. If twitter is the replacement that's really sad because it's soundbite city and a lousy place to have back-and-forth discussion (plus, disgusting ads in your timeline). Ditto Facecrack, where Big Bro Mark looms over your shoulder at all times, nudging you to buy and watch what you say (or so we hear). Any serious political network at this point is probably going to be some encrypted version of a ListServ, which is not to say that such a thing exists. But that's not the open, unregulated digital commons that briefly flourished from 2001-2007. (Caveat that "unregulated" didn't mean protocologically, as Alex Galloway noted.) I've been accused of nostalgia for that era by people who never experienced it and I suppose I am -- this blog is still keeping true to the old model, despite never really being all that gregarious even when I had comments enabled.