Post 5 ... Jarvis and Sullivan

I read through Sullivan’s article again – all nine pages of it. I’m not sure why other than I was feeling very “academic” but it did help towards making this blog post. As I read, I looked for any relation to Jarvis’ model of the press sphere and our discussions of it in class. The first relation I saw was at the bottom of page two.
It reads, “But what? Like any new form, blogging did not start from nothing. It evolved from various journalistic traditions. In my case, I drew on my mainstream-media experience to navigate the virgin sea. I had a few early inspirations: the old Notebook section of The New Republic, a magazine that, under the editorial guidance of Michael Kinsley, had introduced a more English style of crisp, short commentary into what had been a more high-minded genre of American opinion writing. The New Republic had also pioneered a Diarist feature on the last page, which was designed to be a more personal, essayistic, first-person form of journalism. Mixing the two genres, I did what I had been trained to do—and improvised.”
This passage from Sullivan clearly shows a positive relation to Jarvis’ model of the press-sphere. Sullivan talks about his first experience as a blogger and his search for material to put in his blog post. He says that no form of writing starts from nothing. Blogging, for example, started from journalistic traditions. This compares to our discussion of Jarvis’ press sphere is class. Everything seemed to relate to something else: peers to “me”, the internet to peers, etc, etc. So, like any other form of news, blogging borrows from something that existed prior to it.
“The blog remained a superficial medium, of course. By superficial, I mean simply that blogging rewards brevity and immediacy. No one wants to read a 9,000-word treatise online. On the Web, one-sentence links are as legitimate as thousand-word diatribes—in fact, they are often valued more.” This passage from Sullivan too relates to Jarvis’ post. However, it retains a negative sense. Jarvis’ model of “The way it was” and “The way it is now” is shown in this passage. Blogs by their very definition are meant to be superficial and brief and this while good in that it motivated interest from all peoples, also could be bad as anything and everything can be written about anything with complete shallowness which are often put up in the same pedestal as published material.
I like Jarvis’ press sphere that relates to “me” personally. Even though the chart was crude and incomplete, it portrayed what it set out to do - that we now get our news from a variety of sources with our peers heading the list. I found this very accurate as it relates to my life. I don’t go after news. I let it come to me and that’s what the chart portrays.