check it out

Interestingly, one of the posts that shows up in the sidebar on The New Inquiry contains a pretty forceful rebuttal of a lot of the things that I've been writing about.

Thus, to vilify or defend the Internet, or Blogs, or Facebook, or Twitter, etc., as responsible in and of themselves for the noisy meaninglessness of our cultural discourse, for the polarization of our politics, or for the history-eschewing 24-hour news-cycle, is to lose the game before you start. It would be foolish to deny the role of social media in the current Arab uprisings, for example, but it is even more foolish to ascribe responsibility or agency to the sites or media platforms themselves. 

Yet we make this latter mistake all the time.

Read the whole thing.