Ever since I read Laurie Garrett’s personal letter posted around the net almost a year ago following the World Economic Forum, I’ve been intrigued by Davos and what goes on there every year. This year I was following the posts of Joi Ito, who attended as a panelist on Davos’s first ever forum on blogs. Yes, really, one of the biggest economic/business events in the world had a discussion of blogs this year (Joi didn’t seem to be as bowled over as I was).
I followed a link to a site I know I’ve seen in the past, but for some reason haven’t been tracking lately. I will now though. This entry on Whiskey Bar has a lot of great commentary on Davos, the state of the world, and blogs as well:
One guy from Business Week was particularly outraged about the whole thing. He waxed eloquent about the importance of the news “filter” (in my day we called it the gatekeeper function) as mankind’s last best defense against the barbarian hordes. I felt like I was listening to a buggy whip manufacturer, circa 1910, talking about the growing threat of the automobile.
Actually, there was a time when I probably would have agreed with the guy — back when I was on his side of the fence and thought journalists played a valuable watchdog role. But after watching the steady deterioration of the profession over the past ten years or so, I have no patience for such self-serving crap. Yeah, there’s a lot of misinformation and just plain nonsense on the web, but a mass media that gives us Bill O’Reilly and Michael Savage on a regular basis, and that devotes more coverage to Michael Jackson’s legal problems than the Iraq War, isn’t in a position to lecture anyone about standards. The truth is that the blogs are getting better and better, and the mass media is getting worse and worse. If the credibility lines haven’t crossed yet they soon will.
I particularly enjoyed some of his more random comments, especially about Thomas Friedman:
Seeing Tom Friedman at Davos this year was to see the Peter Principle in its late stages — when the inadequacy and egotistical overreaching have become obvious to all but the victim. Even several people I know who generally share his world view told me they found his strutting pomposity almost unbearable this year.
I’ve been reading The Lexus and the Olive Tree quite voraciously lately even though I nearly threw it away after the first chapter since it was nothing more than pithy observations of old-world-versus-new without a shred of analysis or real data. OK, so the rest of the book is pretty much the same, but as I come from an engineering background the pre-school like introduction to world economic forces is rather interesting to me right now.
Net-net, keep an eye out for what happens at Davos, read billmon, and borrow Freidman’s book from a friend.
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