I’m a big fan of Jack Shafer’s writings in Slate, and for the most part he gets it. In Blog Overkill he gets a lot right about blogging, particularly some bloggers underestimation of the power (and adaptability, and cluefulness) of major media outlets.

But despite all that, he still misses the most important point. The portable camera couldn’t revolutionize media the way some predicted they would because recording something isn’t the same as broadcasting that recording. Blogs aren’t a new kind of recording device– they are a socially connected broadcasting tool. The camcorder captures information, blogs amplify them. The comparison is such an apples and oranges kind of thing that I’m astounded Shafer bothered with it. The paper notebook, the cassette recorder, and the digital recorder never had the potential to revolutionize media either.

Shafer’s sarcasm (while earning his coin from a web publication) is more unforgivable than his final bit of cluelesness. The latter is a matter of experience and opinion… but the former exemplifies a childish disrespect that Shafer should be above regardless of the behavior of his antagonists.

As it turns out, not many people are good at predicting the future of media or technology. I suspect that in this case both extreme ends of the spectrum have it wrong (as usual). What we’re likely to see over the next two decades will be a strange kind of convergence possible only through the divergence afforded by technology. Blogs– and the Internet– allow for great range and divergence from the established mainstream, while the plumbing underneath mines that information for ways to create an ever denser network bringing the participants closer together. Whether this is something we can’t wait for or something we should fear is anyone’s guess.