methinks you exaggerate.

it’s not so much replacing the MSM
as having a Watch Dog
(not a Lap Dog,not an Attack Dog)
regard their once private and pristine domain.

as McLuhan noted…
new technologies throw a
very bright light on the old,
an reveal them in startlingly
new ways.

My apologies, everyone.

But I admit, I am concerned about misuse. For example, profiling should not be used in any way other than determining who needs to be questioned in pre-emptive security procedures (such as pre-boarding inspections at airports). That, in my opinion, is proper use for profiling. I do worry about using profiling in place of actual gathering of evidence once a suspect is apprehended. I’m also worried about using profiling to bias opinion towards guilt in an otherwise neutral act. But that can be safeguarded against. I think those are reasonable questions to ask regarding any profiling plan, and can also be the basis for constructing checks against misuse of profiling, but I do not see them as being arguments for avoiding it altogether.

I do admit that I found the contra opinion to profiling to be excessive at times. I remember taking a journalism class in college quite a while ago (back in ‘89, 90, thereabouts). It had a computer simulator for practicing interviewing. You were given a situation, then selected from a list who to question first (the bystander, the police officer, etc.), then selected from another list the questions to ask (”What happened?” “When did this happen?” etc.). There was one question “Was he white, black” or somesuch… the answer you got was “human being”, then the person you were questioning would “refuse to talk” any further, simulating offense to your question. And that was a setup for a lecture about assuming guilt based on race, and how you should avoid asking any questions that can be construed as asking after a person’s racial characteristics. On the one hand, I understand the concern about assuming guilt based on anything other than hard evidence of a crime, but on the other hand, skin color and race are as much objective descriptions as height and clothing are. I asked if it was really inexcuseable to ask (the answer predictably was “yes”), but what I took away from that class was not an aversion to asking after race, but rather an opinion that the school as well as the teacher were less trying to teach and more trying to program that any racial questions have racist origins. And now to today: Avoiding the issue of racial characteristics of terrorists is sort of ignoring hard, factual details regarding the reality behind who terrorists are, but it seems as though a whole generation of people have had the “any racial question is racism” hammered into them and therefore don’t confront the reality of the situation. And that’s a shame. It seems as though we’re purposefully hobbling ourselves by holding this attitude.

I agree with Neo here. Yes, not all terrorists fit the profile. Yes, not all young Muslim males are terrorists. Yes, not all who fit the profile are terrorists. But,it’s crazy to ignore the correlation. And I say that as a young S.E. asian male with roots on an island (Mindanao, Philippines) known for having a muslim insurgency, which puts me smack dab in the middle of that stupid profile. I don’t like brining extra scrutiny down on myself, but even I can’t deny that the profile is a useful tool for determining who gets extra scrutiny. It’s a choice between being insulted and being blown up; I’ll take bruised dignity any day over the alternative.

Is that not a momentous distinction?

As for blogs replacing the MSM, please give us a ring when 95% of the blogosphere does not reference items in that very same MSM.

I cam over to welcome you back and find we are posting on the same issue, from different perspectives:

we are dependent on image shapers and the media to construct a reality for us, and we are often none the wiser that it is a distorted reality.

Come over and read my take on the latest radio “news” from Hamas:

Manipulating the News, Big Time

BTW, reading your excerpt from Kundera reminds me of the first time I read him: the sense that Kafka was alive and well. The same sinking sensation when I read the news story out of Gaza today…

It is hard to “keep aholt to” (as they say around here) one’s soul in such times…

More insidious than that. For example, with large circulation magazines, it is common to poll a selection of readers on the contents of an issue; which articles they read and recalled, what they thought about the articles, etc. in order to get a picture of what the reader is responding to.

The reports are given to the company ostensibly for the use of the advertising department, but are also disseminated to the publisher and to the editors. They are, of course, never supposed to influence the way in which editors select and assign stories, but of course they do.

What happens over time is that the magazine gets closer and closer to the core readers’ likes and articles that go against that grain are either spiked or never considered.

Readers out from this center can feel increasingly distant from the publication until they stop paying attention to it. At that point, the audience is more and more made up of those who are, in some way, driving the story selection via content reports.

All is well as long as the magazine can keep bringing new readers into the fold, but when that limit is reached the magazine and the subject matter it has come to consider “our subject matter” begins to die off.

At this point, content reports instead of enhancing circulation actually begin to kill it off. The usual response to this is to think that “our look is wrong” and to send out for a radical redesign. But since the content and story selection isn’t changing, just the bottle it is poured into, the decline continues.

You can think of a lot of things in American life that follow this poll-powered curve — tv networks, newspapers, the Democratic Party, and even small towns whose means of a graphic redesign is to allow large “heritage” murals to be done on the walls of the abandoned buildings.

When the graphic redesign or the large murals show up, the town has pretty much had it.