Similarly, we’ve seen a classic case of the calling into being of a phantom public in all the emails and texts sent to Liberal MPs – polarised between categories (“denialists”, etc) which hardly have any resonance in most Australians’ vocabularies or lived experience. Yet it’s taken for reality, and it seemingly has had a real effect in that alternative universe that is the Liberal Parliamentary Party.

So what of the role of the media in all this?

With some exceptions, such as Laura Tingle on Lateline tonight (and, for that matter, Annabel Crabb the other night), the legacy media has intoned very predictable scripts (and as I’ve emphasised, forgotten an alternative one – “strong leader stands up to party dinosaurs and appeals over their heads to public” – which Malcolm Turnbull has been busily reinscribing).

Even in alternative media, such as Crikey, we’ve seen Bernard Keane (aside from his strange obsession with talking up virtues few others can see in Andrew Robb) swing from the standard “dead man walking” talk to “Turnbull is actually going to fight!”… why the latter was a surprise, I have no idea. I’d been suggesting some days earlier it was characteristic of his persona, and also politically rational. Yet the commentariat in their massed battalions seemed to anticipate his folding in the face of the Minchin putsch.

As Andrew Elder asked, could this be the week the journosphere failed?

Let’s not forget Turnbull may win on Tuesday.

What, then, of the frenzied expression of common press gallery wisdom?

Will the shorter Peter Van Onselen still be “Hockey can unify the party because he’s Minchin’s sock puppet”?

Perhaps the only “high level sources” they talk to are the ones who have an agenda. Like I said recently, it’s a bit like Imre Salusinszky having his fill of Chinese lunches at various eateries in and around Sussex Street and then retailing the latest goss on who’s going to overthrow Nathan Rees, only to find that Nathan Rees overthrew his detractors, and no journo saw it coming. Perhaps because something actually happened, as opposed to the endless non-event of leadership talk.

Sometimes politics doesn’t play to script.

Turning to Twitter, as Worst of Perth commented here, it’s been very interesting indeed. For anyone assiduously following this thing, it really has been the best real time news source, and quite amusing and fun too. It’s very well suited to these sorts of fast moving events, and the degree of inaccuracy and rumour is precisely the same as what makes it into the press and the telly. Not least because a fair bit of it is Sky News as it happens…

Interesting also to me has been the fact that a lot of the journos in Canberra who’ve been of greatest value are ones whose bylines are not well known. Maybe they’re working a bit harder than the tv stars and ubiquitous commentators?

On the other hand, as I’ve already alluded to, seasoned, intelligent and insightful commentators such as Laura Tingle prepared to buck the herd, whose work in the Fin Review is only available to those who spend 3 bucks on the paper, and who gets less air time than the show ponies, have shown their worth – as on Lateline tonight.

But, let’s get all this in perspective.

It’s also significant that while #spill is now the most popular tag on Australian Twitter, the fifth is #xmedialab – which is a discussion about a cross media conference that is on in Sydney at the moment. This medium doesn’t have much of a reach, and it has less of a reach than blogs, and slower moving media generally. And that may be because a lot of people are simply not interested in the scoop of the second (83 new tweets since you started searching).

At the same time, the core audience of political junkies, if Twitter is any indication, haven’t been clicking through to MSM stories at all. As Stephen Feneley commented at #spill, journos tweeting is a double edged sword.

That’ll be related to a shift where those who are most engaged around issues are finding their own spaces to interact, often private – lots of the old core of the web is shrinking as people highly attuned to particular communities of interest resort to discussing their own take on stories on social media sites such as Facebook without even looking at actual media reports, preferring to rely on others’ quick summaries of links through social distribution. Whether or not this becomes a wider trend is, at this stage, moot, but something is underway. But it replicates ancient social and cultural patterns – talking about stuff you’ve heard, which is different from silent reading, or even a more organised and structured discussion of what is read. The first is Twitter writ large.

Both practices have their value, but the assumption that reading and reflection is superior has had its day, unless it’s a normative pronouncement as opposed to a description of social reality.

So there may be a role for slow and fast in this fast moving media world. But slow needs to catch up, and fast needs to slow down and be more reflective if it’s to compete with the best of slow.

But that needs to be understood, and the limits of the publics who are both being invoked and created through these discourses have to be recognised too.

I will say that it is a bit of a worry that a heap of stuff that needs to have been factored in, including but not limited to the actual policy shift involved in the CPRS amendments, what’s happening elsewhere in the world in the lead up to Copenhagen, the new dimensions of climate change, and even what the government has at stake, has completely dropped off the radar. At LP, we’ve tried our best to keep that stuff in focus. But it’s been slim pickings anywhere else, with only a few distinguished exceptions such as New Matilda.

Some lessons need to be drawn from all this which transcend the tired dichotomies of legacy and social media, and I hope they will be.

Ps: LP can be followed on Twitter here.

Elsewhere: Axel Bruns at Gatewatching.

Update: The Newspoll results analysed tonight certainly suggest a disjunction between press commentary and voters’ sentiments, and indeed, the view from the Canberra political class and Liberal voters in the cities.

Judge Madden rejected the claims by the blogger’s lawyer that the comments were mere opinion or “trash talk”, and that only factual assertions could be considered libellous.

“The thrust of the blog is that the petitioner is a sexually promiscuous woman,” Judge Madden wrote in her judgment, noting that the comments were run alongside photos of Cohen in suggestive poses.

The blog, which was shut down in March, was almost entirely devoted to slagging off Cohen. It contained just five entries, all of which were published on August 21 last year.

It’s interesting to ponder how some of the comments on prominent blogs hosted by mainstream media organisations might fare if this precedent were followed in Australia. We all know what I’m talking about, but for a sample of the sort of bilge that is far too blithely published, see the quotes in Jason Wilson’s piece yesterday at New Matilda.

To some degree, bloggers on MSM sites have a practical, if not legal, immunity because of the deep pockets of their employers. But those who effectively make money for those mastheads, as Wilson argues, by eagerly responding to the elicitation of grossly offensive and personalised comments, might pause and consider whether they’d individually be prepared to defend them in court. I doubt the bloggers who foster attack speech would offer anything other than rhetorical support.

Some comments threads on independent blogs might also be problematic. I can think of some blogs where the comments consist almost entirely of vilification and abuse of individuals.

It’s also well worth noting that misogynistic slurs were the basis for this court decision.

Elsewhere: Mashable.

Update: Bronwen Clune.

Update: Legal Eagle.

Update: Kate Harding at The Guardian‘s Comment is Free.

A few years ago, the News publicity machine was trumpeting that Murdoch “gets” the internet. Perhaps he’s feeling a bit disillusioned after buying Myspace just at the point when its eventual eclipse by other social networking sites could have been predicted.

Murdoch also claims that Google News undermines “brand loyalty”. That’s to make the false assumption that newspapers enjoy all that much of it these days. Gone are the days when bourgeois values dictated that an upstanding bowler-hatted citizen bought the “right” newspaper. Affinity with a news brand is a bit of a reach for newspapers targeting a mass market – it’s possible when you’re talking about niche or hyperlocal publications, but unlikely to have much salience with, say, the Courier-Mail.

Similarly, it’s not that Google has an evil plan to accustom readers to sourcing news from a variety of originating publications. Google is just replicating emergent consumption habits, which of course is why it’s been so successful.

If “newsrooms” heed Murdoch’s “call to arms” (and some no doubt will because, well, he owns them) and return to a pay for view model they’ll be cutting their own throats. Murdoch may thunder that it’s wrong for folks to think information should be free (without perhaps noticing the irony of the clash with his oft-stated ideology). But this is to ignore the fact that newspapers – for a century or more – have traditionally been cheap. If fewer and fewer customers are prepared to spend a buck fifty on a dead tree copy of The Australian, how many would pay to read its content online? The idea of a Kindle like newspaper reader is also a dead end. Failed experiments in delivering replications of print papers online go back to the 1980s – before the web was conceived. A fundamental shift – or rather a series of fundamental shifts – have occurred over the past few decades, and Murdoch risks driving his news business to an early grave.

There are also some fallacies around the idea of “content creation” in this context. Another irony is that increasing amounts of “industrial journalism” production are being outsourced to worse and worse paid freelancers by companies such as News, not to mention what were once core functions such as sub-editing. If Murdoch’s concern really lay with content creators, he wouldn’t be acting in this fashion. His real concern, of course, is with the ownership of and economic returns to content. But that’s another horse who bolted long ago.

Related to this trope of ownership and control is the dissing of blogs and other independent online media for “recycling” journalistic content. I think that’s a very inaccurate description of what blogs do, but let’s leave that aside. What it does point to is the hollowness of the notion that newspapers are “the heart of the nation” – or the centre of a vibrant public sphere. It amounts to an attempted prohibition on the discussion of news and the production of public opinion, except by those within the corporation’s walls (and walled off domains).

So those who are trying to protect the salaried model of journalism, and those who think this model protects the public interest, might pause and consider whether this sort of approach is really the way to go – even if a supposedly successful and brilliant mogul suggests it is. If Murdoch’s proved anything with this spray, it’s that he gets neither the internet nor, arguably, the media business.

You can find the blog here – Pineapple Party Time!

Posts on PPT will be exclusive there. That’s really because I’ll probably get fairly fired up about the state campaign – since it’s in my neck of the woods and I’m part of that small minority who really does get quite enthused at election time – so I wanted to avoid LP having its front page constantly dominated by Queensland election stuff. The other reason is that – as I said – I’m interested in exploring a number of questions about the viability of event specific blogs in a real time environment. What we’ll be doing here is a daily links post from either me or Kim, which will also provide an open thread for LPers to discuss the Quinceland campaign, post links, speculate, etc, etc. Me aside, all the other LP bloggers who care to are absolutely free to post election stuff here.

There are a couple of cross-posts up at PPT – there to seed it with some comment for the launch announcement in today’s Crikey email. There are also two new posts – one on the Stuart Copeland candidacy in Condamine and the Newspoll and the other on the question of whether the early election will impact on the result – a question that’s somewhat more important than all the rest of the kerfuffle about the early election speculation.

Distant Suns: a clean sword and a clean foe to flesh it in.

<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/449771960_c2d4d9e4f9.jpg"

Image of a Conan comic courtesy of j_phillipp at Flickr, reproduced under a Creative Commons licence.

Conan is arguably the most iconic figure of the fantasy era, but he’s a somewhat enigmatic one, too. So widely sampled and replayed, you could talk about the character that Schwarzenegger immortalised, or Marvel’s Conan, or the L. Sprague De Camp Conan of the fifties. It’s easy to forgot the original, which is why I took the time to wade through 1000-odd pages of un-bowdlerised Conan recently.

And the original is a much more complicated, interesting figure than the subsequent versions. Robert E. Howard’s Conan represents a weird combination of ubermensch and bestial throwback. A petty thief, a pirate, a king and a soldier, the only thing he’s not good at is magic.

His physicality is almost parody: Whilst the popular conception of Conan is a bit reductionist, do prepare for mighty thews, steely thews and rippling thews; a veritable bestiary of thews. Some critics have used Howard’s near-fetish for the barbarian’s body as demonstration of repressed homosexuality, but in my opinion that’s a long bow to draw (the kind of bow you need thews for!). Howard certainly worships Conan – as does everyone in these stories that isn’t trying to kill him – but his pantherish body is merely one facet.

Howard takes great pains to demonstrate Conan’s smarts and natural cunning. These stories have the barbarian commanding armies, exposing spies and planning heists. It’s a natural intelligence – more an instinctive cunning and foresight than wisdom or shrewd intelligence. And it’s relatively believable, and surprisingly appealing.

Having read some of Howard’s other stories, I was prepared for powerful, but unlikable characters and prose. The popular vision of Conan – helped in no small part by John Milius’ film – is both misogynist and racist. I don’t want paint the Conan oeuvre as politically sensitive and progressive but compared to some of Howard’s other work, and the work of his contemporaries – and sadly much fantasy published today – it’s really not too bad.

Certainly, every woman lusts after Conan as surely as they need rescuing, but he does meet his equal on more than one occasion. Women rescue Conan, fight with Conan and sometimes even leave Conan; they’re always secondary characters, but frankly so is everyone to the barbarian.

And yes, the black characters are frequently evil, perverted sorcerers from the desert, but there are also black characters that are allies. Howard reserves his strongest disdain not for primitive civilisations worshipping ape or snake gods in the jungle, but the arrogant white men who think they can conquer them.

More than any other theme, Howard’s disgust and exasperation with civilisation ring out in the Conan stories. Reflecting his strong confederate family history, Howard has little positive to say about the ‘cultured’ races of Hyborea, highlighting treatment that civilisation metes out casually, but would be unthinkable to the barbarian cultures.

And Conan represents the ultimate defeat of civilisation. His instincts are faster, righter than his over-thinking, under-using enemies, and despite their superior weapons, black magic, armies and slaves, they fall to his sword surely as the abyssal beasts he sometimes slays.

But perhaps this is ultimately confirming, rather than questioning your image of Conan. What really did surprise me, as I was reading the chronicles was their astonishing influence. Howard is largely credited with inventing Sword and Sorcery, a genre subsequently taken up by writers likeFritz Leiber, C.L. Moore, and more recently Steven Brust and a host of others. But as I worked my way further into the stories, I honestly believe that in Conan, Howard has invented modern fantasy as we know it.

These stories include magic, odysseys, truly cinematic battle scenes involving thousands, comedy, tragedy, stories of castle life and rebellion. J.R.R Tolkien is frequently credited as the father of fantasy, but Lord of the Rings was published over ten years after Howard killed himself, and without taking anything away from him, LOTR has definitely dated. The Chronicles of Conan – bar the thews, perhaps – could have been written yesterday. Howard’s prose is astonishingly vivid and punchy; astonishingly contemporary.

It’s a prose that bears far more in common with modern fantasy – even modern high fantasy – than much of Tolkien, and this is especially apparent as the stories go on, leaving us with a tantalising glimpse of what a forty or fifty year old Howard could have done with Conan.

These stories aren’t perfect. The early ones in particular are extremely formulaic, and there are some camp, faintly ridiculous moments, alongside some sexism and racism. But Howard’s prose hooks you like crack. One paragraph and you’re standing on the cliffs with Conan, staring down at the swarming tribes, and those fantastic clichés we’re all familiar with – messianic stable boys, lisping elves, covetous dragons, Germanic countryside and unaccountably ubiquitous stews – are nowhere in sight. It’s thrilling, even eighty years later.

The good news for Conan fans is there is no shortage of online companionship, with fantastic scholarships sites, online games, and a highly regarded blog/journal, The Cimmerian to take the journey further. Unfortunately Howard ended his life before he could advance the story himself, and the Conan that L. Sprague De Camp edited and wrote – however well-intentioned – is not cut from the same silken loin cloth; it will only disappoint you.

As I finished reading the Complete Chronicles of Conan, I was aware of two things: a major voice in fantasy that I had only listened to murmurs of previously, and a hunger for more. A lusty, vigorous hunger, by Crom, a hunger not sated by the pretty, delicate scribblings of modern bards! God help me, I might have to read The Steel Remains next.

This will be the last weekend open thread; in fact, it will be the last thread of any sort here at Blogocracy. I have handed in my notice and I am finishing up today. I do this with a great deal of sadness but also with a sense of excitement about new prospects.

Establishing his blogging cred at Road to Surfdom, Tim became one of Australia’s notable and most thoughtful bloggers so it was no surprise to see him get a gig somewhere in the MSM. It wasn’t without some early difficulties but the blog found its space and audience and Tim probably delivered what the editors wanted.

It’s easy to be critical, but as any full time blogger knows, two years plugging away at a very busy blog is hard work and can rub the creative edges off any writer.

Happily we hear that Tim is off to recharge his creative batteries; that will eventually produce a book, something that I’ll look forward to, so he should know he’ll sell at least one copy.

So long and thanx for the fish Tim.