Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

I am not an expert, but…

I'm planning a little bit of a departure for the next couple of posts, which I hope you don't mind. And if you do, well, never mind. We'll get through it together.

I think, as someone who isn't an expert and has never really claimed to be one, I have as much insight as anyone into what's going on with politics, the media, sport, well anything really. This is a punter's insight, not anything particularly special.

But I think that's the good thing about it. This is what I like about blogging, and what I like about the online community in general. Everyone has a voice, even though we aren't all experts. It's what you do with those voices that counts and how you make them heard.

Our voices are getting louder as the foundations of the traditional media crumble, for one reason and another. And I think that's a marvellous thing. It's easy to demonise the online world or imagine that we're all the kind of snarky little weasels who often leave vitriolic comments underneath online news articles - but I don't think we are.

And there is really no 'we', either, which is a wonderful thing, too. There is no organised online army, no Twitter mob with flaming torches, no mass of seething humanity determined to dumb down culture with our swearing and our blog posts.

Anyway, what I'm going to try and write about is why I love the online world, what it has to offer, and why it's an exciting time - and why we can have plenty to look forward to, as the old media decay and find it increasingly difficult to sustain their operations.

In many ways we should mourn their decline; in others, not. And this isn't a case of 'filling the void' either. I don't think bloggers are going to fill the void left by investigative journalists; of course not.

But I don't think it's an either/or scenario, either. These changes are coming, whether we like them or not. And they're coming fast.

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