Daily Kos has an article about journalist Laurie Garrett quitting the profession after sharing some doom and gloom about journalism in general. There are a lot of fans of Laurie Garrett, it appears; she seems to be one of the "good guys".
And yet, you may recall that Laurie Garrett was the main character of a rather interesting dust-up a couple of years ago. Seems she had attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and sent her off-the-record thoughts to some friends. Those thoughts promptly got forwarded throughout the entire net.
Here is the article that describes the entire saga. But I was especially struck by this rant she sent along to the online crowd that became passionately involved with the matter:
Do you imagine for a moment that the participants in the WEF - whether they be the CEOs of Amoco an IBM of the leaders of Amnesty International and OXFAM - waste their time with Internet chat rooms and discussions such as this? Do you actually believe, as you type your random thoughts in such Internet settings, that you are participating in Civilization? In Democracy? In changing your world?
I remember this moment. For those participating, it was one of the watershed moments of the then-young blogosphere gaining access to "privileged information". It was huge, an emergent realization of what kind of power the new community could possibly have. And I imagine that for some, Laurie's vent was probably met with an internal, steely resolve to prove she didn't know what the hell she was talking about.
Posted by tunesmith at March 8, 2005 11:36 PM
