Last night's event at the Take Back America conference on bloggers hosted by Stephanie Miller hasn't got much play on the blogs, but it seems to me that it's important to mention. It was broadcast on CSpan2 at 8pm last night. It was a strong example of the confusion that bloggers spark in anyone who doesn't do the deed often.

As a recent Kos diary puts it, citing a Carol Darr report from the IPDI Institute at George Washington University, academics and the MSM still think of bloggers as a threat rather than an unstoppable development in the structure of communcations.

These campus blogethicists like Carol Darr at IPDI love to pontificate about the harm that bloggers cause their precious profession, even as they fail to understand that bloggers are, in huge part, a response to the failings of their profession. So they pontificate from their ivory towers, oblivious to the excesses and failures of "legitimate" journalists around them.

It's unfortunate that academics are reacting similarly as the outdated and reactive MSM to the blogosphere. Last night's event was another example of the 'blogs are crazy and I don't get it' meme that circulates regularly nowadays. The guests weren't asked questions about how their blogs have influenced the political climate, and what power do they hold for the future of politics. Most of the questions were about social security, the war in Iraq, and, to the credit of the woman who asked the question, why the blogosphere is dominated by men, and particularly white men.

It reminds me of a scene from the movie Hackers, which according to the Internet Movie Database is an 'electronica-fused thriller,' where the producers attempted to visualize a hacking experience with a spacy, exotic, city-like landscape visualization with large oddly colored boxes representing programs or parts of the computer system, and a hand representing the hacker manuevering through the system.

Those Bloggers are so crazy!!! BlogFIRE!