McCrum's Crumbs

It seems that Robert McCrum has been moved to clarify his position about blogs (see previous post), doing so, in all places, at the Guardian's book blog:

People - readers - complain about change, but I like it. Change is good, and change has served global literature well, on balance. The world of books is in better shape than for a very long time.

Call me a crazy optimist, but I conclude my piece by suggesting that we live in a golden age of self-expression, of which the 175, 000 blogs are just one example. Who knows what it amounts to? We cannot say. Only our grandchildren will be able to judge the literary quality of these 10 years.

What's not in doubt is that it's a huge democratic moment: more people than ever before are being able to share their ideas and feelings with a global audience, and to engage in a vivid contemporary dialogue about the meaning of culture, in books, film, music, theatre and art.

How bad can that be?

What else can I say?  To see a man back away from what seemed to be his original sentiment--that blogs have somehow been responsible for the demise of the newspaper book review which in turn has led to diminished standards of what is being published and read--to become what sounds like a proponent of technology in general, and if you read into it enough, even blogs is quite a sea change in twenty-four hours.  But hey, that's the power of blogs.

Comments

[Richard]

I guess I don't think it's a sea-change from what I read of his original article just an hour or so ago.

I have to say that I think bloggers are incredibly defensive and see attacks where there aren't any.

[Jeff]

I guess you and I are reading two different articles, Richard. Hard to misinterpret a quote like, "The omens are not encouraging" in his "chapter" on book blogs. I don't necessarily think that McCrum is attacking as much as he's part of the ever-growing population of old-school reviewers who do not fully understand or embrace the change. At least in McCrum's case he seems to be backing away from his stance or perhaps he didn't make this clear enough in his original article and felt he needed to clarify. So be it. I don't think I'm the only one who read his original article as being at the very least disparaging to blogs.

Besides, how can you not read into what has been written the last year or so as anything but attacks on blogs? The message has been pretty clear that somehow we are doing more damage than good.

[the Minister of Words, Sports and Tourism]

I, the Minister of Words, Sports and Tourism, am no expert on these extremely complicated Public Relations and Marketing Department things but, according to my colleagues over at the Ministry of Information and Propaganda, this seems to be an extremely complicated Public Relations and Marketing Department thing that I fundamentally choose to neither support nor oppose (until I know which option is the most profitable one).