The rise of the blogosphere continues to change the face of American culture. According to observers, the internet is now home to millions of web-logs (more commonly known as "blogs"), and something like eleven million Americans claim to have started blogs themselves. All this adds up to a major shift in our national culture and a massive threat to the dominance of what is now nostalgically called "mainstream media" (or "MSM"). Blogger, radio host, and attorney Hugh Hewitt documented the rise and influence of blogs in Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing the World. Hewitt's point was quite simple--those who would lead and influence Americans had better take advantage of the blogging phenomenon and learn how to communicate in this new medium. "Change isn't coming. It is here," he advised. "Information is being absorbed in new and startlingly different ways from new, and until recently, unknown sources."
Now, art critic Terry Teachout offers an analysis of the blogging phenomenon that mixes personal testimony with deep cultural observations. In, "Culture in the Age of Blogging," Teachout devotes his considerable skills as a writer and his deep expertise as a critic of culture and takes a hard look at the blogosphere.
Published in the June 2005 issue of Commentary, Teachout's article is primarily directed at those who follow developments in America's "high culture." In other words, Teachout's regular readers are those who follow developments in the art scene, regularly attend art museums and exhibitions, are serious students of classical music, and are likely to be devotees of the theater. After all, in Teachout's other life he is the music critic for Commentary as well as the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal. A member of the National Council on the Arts, Teachout is a formidable conservative critic.
Now, he is also a blogger. Teachout has joined with literary critic Laura Demanski to produce "About Last Night," a blog hosted at ArtsJournal.com. Clearly, this was not something Teachout had expected to do. For one thing, the blogosphere has been dominated by political commentary and cultural analysis has been more commonly found in the established journals, review pages, and other dimensions of elite media. Teachout's decision to join the blogging revolution represents something of a revolution in itself.
In this article, Teachout explains why he made this decision and what this means for the larger culture. In a nutshell, Teachout believes that America's common culture no longer exists.
Describing the change that produced the blogging phenomenon, Teachout offers this observation: "The simplest description of this change is also the starkest one: the common culture of widely shared values and knowledge that once helped to unite Americans of all creeds, colors, and classes no longer exists. In its place we now have a "balkanized" group of subcultures whose members pursue their separate, unshared interests in an unprecedented variety of ways."
This represents an enormous shift in American self-consciousness, Teachout admits. "The idea of a common American culture is so central to the American idea itself that it was long taken for granted. Just as young people pledged allegiance to the American flag in school each day, so they studied the same historical events, read many of the same books, heard the same popular songs on radio, and watched the same movies and TV programs. No one, whether in or out of school, seriously attempted to deny that our country's cultural heritage would rather be Judeo-Christian West, and more specifically of what Winston Churchill called 'the English-speaking peoples.'"
America demonstrated an amazing capacity to "absorb immigrant folkways," but the nation was shaped by a common culture and worldview. That world has simply disappeared.
