Web 2.0 skeptic, author of dotcom entrepreneur, Andrew Keen fought a feisty battle with a number of callers to Five Live's phone-in the other morning. Keen feels much of the web is devalued by amateur content that spawns inane theory and the devotion of the feeble-minded. When Tim from Notting Hill called in ranting about the absurd 911 conspiracy theory website Loose Change, claiming how 'four MPs' had now given the site the seal of approval, it was as much a Keen could take. Tim got short shrift as he tried to disprove Keen's assertion that bloggers and callers were unpaid purveyors of content drivel who devalued professional content proivders in particular, and the web in general. As Tim whined away about Bush and Cheney flying planes into buildings, Keen resorted the withering insults. Poor old Tim could not have proved Keen's assertion more vividly. Underneath all this was a more salient message that the web as an omnibus media - or should that be media omnibus - has seriouosly damaged democracy in process.
Politicians in the web age have a thankless, impossible task. The immediacy of the internet puts pressure not just on the print media, but rolling news on radio and TV, and one of Blair's more unattractive legacies is New Labour's rampant pandering to this agenda.
However, with the recent of the Falklands War and the Thatcher premiership, and more recently the raft of Blair premiership obits, it does seem the past can deliver those who have suffered from the present. It is extraordinary how those of us who remember successive Tory victories seem to have forgotten that the only media of any weight in town - the daily press - was almost entirely faithful to the Tories. With the exception of Maxwell's Daily Mirror and The nascent Independent, every single other paper offered little more than canine devotion to the Tories. Is it any wonder Blair - and New Labour's - priority was media influence? When the bleating about spin first emerged, my initial instinct was of the bear defecating in woods school.
History will record this, as it will wonder at how Blair's nickname 'Bambi' disappeared from the public consciousness almost the day his was chosen as John Smith's successor. It's not so much that the web is the cause of this forgetfulness, but it certainly clouds the memory. That said it is heartening to hear both sides of the spectrum rubbishing the unfair and fundamentally wrong assertion that Blair was Bush's poodle, for example. Indeed, if he was, part of the Balkans might well have adopted the effete beast as its totem. Likewise, more are relating how Blair insisted on Britain's part in the Iraq invasion.
It was obvious to anyone capable of putting aside a natural revulsion of George W Bush pre-9/11 record, that Blair's endorsement of that adventure was a genuine conviction move. Paxman was absolutely justified in asking the Prime Minister if he and Bush prayed together, but I don't think he implied subservience in this question.
The killer blow - the dossier - was, in many cases almost literally, manna from heaven for the bloggers. The web produced a legion of bedroom polemicists, mostly from the left. Traditionally a free press would provide a platform for a Pilger or a Fisk to turn reportage into soapbox. Now bloggers could do the same, usually by slavishly rehashing their copy verbatim, mixed in with any old rumour from around still more unaccountable website and blogs feeding a self serving community of unquestioning paranoia and ignorance. Global reach gave succour to the deluded and strength in numbers the unshakable belief they were, still are, right. Loose Change is the ultimate expample of this. A site that devotes itself to promoting a ludicrous conspiracy implicating the Bush administration in 9/11 and yet ignoring the fact that it is allowed to exist by the very police state it purports the Bush administration to be.
Nick Cohen's What's Left bemoans the way the traditional left had completely forgotten any notion of solidarity in the context of the Iraq War. He is not alone on the traditional left who finds himself aghast that liberals and trade unionists couldn't find it in themselves to support the plight of the Iraqi people - and trade union members - as they were delivered from their fascist oppressor. For that the web may not be to blame, but it certainly hasn't helped.
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