AO Scott, in his otherwise-impressive piece on The Believer and N+1, offers a fairly bizarre attack, or at least characterization, of blogs:
At a time when older forms of media are supposedly being swallowed up by newer ones, the impulse to start the kind of magazine Partisan Review was in the late 1930's or The Paris Review was in the 50's might look contrarian, even reactionary. If you are an overeducated (or at least a semi-overeducated) youngish person with a sleep disorder and a surfeit of opinions, the thing to do, after all, is to start a blog. There are no printing costs, no mailing lists, and the medium offers instant membership in a welcoming herd of independent minds who will put you in their links columns if you put them in yours. Blogs embody and perpetuate a discourse based on speed, topicality, cleverness and contention - all qualities very much ascendant in American media culture these days. To start a little magazine, then...is, at least in part, to lodge a protest against the tyranny of timeliness. It is to opt for slowness, for rumination, for patience and for length. It is to defend the possibility of seriousness against the glibness and superficiality of the age - and also, of course, against other magazines.
So what's the argument here, that literary magazines are the slow-cooking movement of the writing world? And what are blogs, McDonalds? What's so strange here is that these magazines never left. The American Prospect, The Nation, The Baffler, Spy, The Washington Monthly, The New York Review of Books -- there's really no shortage of thoughtful, considered magazines offering new issues on a decidedly non-blog-like timetable. Which makes A.O's broadside, as I said before, a bit bizarre.
On the other hand, blogs certainly seem to be playing the role of delicious TV dinner, threatening to displace and deemphasize Mom's lovingly crafted casseroles. A.O, I guess, feels a bit strange having websites grow while The New York Times shrinks. He's certainly not the first one, but he should be the last.
