It's as if there are two default positions for thinking on the blogosphere: it's either triumphalism over the entrenched "media elites", or it's disdain over the blogosphere's "unwashed masses" getting the good seats.

This is nothing more - or less - than a natural progression that started a long, long time ago. When the printing press was first invented, it was a sea change - suddenly, the number of people who could get their words on paper jumped up. It was no longer the case that only the authorities (spiritual or temporal) could get things down on paper and distributed; a decent sized swath of the emerging middle class could do so as well. In Germany in particular, this led to a rise in pamphlateering, something you could almost call early blogging.

Over time, the cost of getting something printed and distributed centralized somewhat - an area can only support a finite number of newspapers, for instance. That didn't change a lot with the introduction of radio and television - broadcast facilities are expensive, and bandwidth is limited. By the mid twentieth century, getting an opinion published for broad distribution still had plenty of gatekeepers. They were no longer priests or princes, as they had been before the invention of the press, but they existed.

The web has changed all that. Suddenly, bandwidth limits and costs both disappeared. As we move into the second half of the first decade of the 21st century, we have something truly new - anyone and everyone can publish. That doesn't mean that anyone publishing will get attention - having a soapbox doesn't guarantee an audience by any means. It does mean that we are no longer limited to whatever opinions the media elite want to hand out though. As I noted this morning, there's text, audio, and video for every imaginable niche. When I was growing up, finding a local source for information on games was really hard - board gaming (especially the subset I was in then, war gaming), is a niche audience. Other than the occasional scare story about "those weirdos playing D&D", information was very limited, and hard to find - especially if you lived outside a major city.

Now? Well, have a look at Steve Wessel's post - there are podcasts galore devoted to boardgaming. My options for getting information on this niche are no longer strictly limited. Are there downsides to that? Of course. Not every niche interest is uplifting, and some of them are downright scary. You can find online communities devoted to anything and everything, not all of it good. As Glenn Reynolds puts it, we've got an "Army of Davids" now - and they can be devoted to anything. How you see that army depends largely on who you are - to people in niche communities that have been underserved by traditional media, it looks like a lifeline. To the editors of existing newspapers and news networks, it looks more like an angry mob with pitchforks.

You can see the disparate reactions here and here, in differing views on MySpace. Nick Carr sees a mostly boring bunch of all too typical poseurs; Scott Karp sees a cesspool of virtual filth that ought to be moderated. I can't say I've looked at MySpace specifically, but - based on the rest of the blogosphere - I'd say that it's both and neither - at the same time. What you see there is what you see everywhere on the web - an abundance of opinions and lifestyles, unchained from the limits of physical space. Unable to find a group of like-minded people (on any subject) where you live? Go online, and you'll find them waiting. For some people, the sheer variety of communities is scary. The traditional media, with their inherent limits (bandwidth and costs) excluded a lot of that from our view. What the web and inexpensive/free publishing has done is turn the lights on - and some people think that much of what they see is roaches scurrying for the dark.

The thing to keep in mind is that the viewer is always in control. We can always turn off the TV or radio, for instance, and we can simply not visit the corners of the web that bother us. The impulse to control traditional media gained traction because of the limits that media has - operating a TV station is expensive, and bandwisth is limited. Even with cable and satellite systems, there's only so much content that's going to come down that pipe. The web is different - there's no limit to how many sites there can be, and we don't all have to go to the same ones. What we have is the potential realization of the freedom that Gutenberg's invention promised.