Newsnight blogging

What is blogging? A stupid word, to begin with. In fact, I hate it (both the word and the action). I find it can be extremely meaningless and when I 'blog' (bizarrely I imagine others to be bloggers and never see myself as one). I usually (as has become custom) drink cider whilst watching Question Time and/or Newsnight Review. I then - semi-inebriated - write something I consider topical while taking in the discussion on the screen. A pretty absurd picture, if you can paint an image of it for a moment. 

So inevitably, Newsnight Review had to one day tackle the issue of blogging whilst, well, I'm jotting down observations of Newsnight Review. Tonight is that night. And in a interesting little twist, the item (about to be shown) is about a policeman's blog. I feel rather remorseful for calling the police 'filth' and 'pigs' (though understandably so in light of being kettled at the Bank of England precisely a month ago), though I am waiting with bated breath to listen to the analysis. 

It features the blog NightJack, the Orwell Prize Winner 2009, which is the diary of a police officer going by the pseudonym Jack Night. Can it be literature, Kirsty Wark asks.........

........we delve into the life of Jack Night in the Newsnight Review item. We hear about the Evil Poor, 1950s policing idealism, keeping the peace, protecting life and property, morale at the front and so on.

Paul Morley opines that it is not a blog, but rather literature and criticises user-generated content, which - despite the fact I am typing this - I quite agree with. He hopes that a great writer like Jack Night should be able to find a way of converting this into printed literature. I have not read it in detail; I cannot judge. But then he compares it to a DVD box set, where one watches one episode after another. 

Diane Wei Liang likes the blog and doesn't share Paul Morley's reservations of blogging, but what is revealed is that Jack Night has stopped blogging and is now preparing his novel. Does that indicated that typing on a keyboard and storing the content in cyberspace is in fact just a stage, an inbetween? 

What about the anonymity and the fear of being discovered? 

Miranda Sawyer believes that anonymity has actually been beneficial to the quality of Jack Night's content (and blogging in general). He and others are not represented by Max Clifford and similar vampires. It also makes it very difficult to pin down. Paul Morley points out that it is very difficult to put Jack Night into particular political categories. He is neither left, right, centrist, liberal, authoritarian or anything else. 

But does this really apply to other bloggers? Personally, I think it is not to difficult to get a feel for political discourses in blogs. Are we thus more exposed to a variety of political discourses? I am torn between believing on the one hand that we get 'boxed in', merely choosing what suits us (prime examples would be exterme right-wingers who frequent self-fulfilling sites confirming white is might is right); but on the other hand (and judging perhaps from own experience), the web necessarily exposes us to blogs, thought, articles, pieces that do in fact challenge our comfort zone. But perhaps it would be far too naive that seemingly boundless information automatically results in the ability to choose without restriction. Our own world - the one we create - leads us to and from particular areas and fora, and the idea that are choices are free and start at zero strikes me as ill-conceived and a libertarian myth. 

The bottle is empty; Newsnight is up.......