Global Lunchroom - I caught a great item by Stanford linguist Geoff Nunberg on WHYY's Fresh Air the other day. He began by mentioning his own attempts at blogging and the difficulty many journalists have in finding the right online voice. Nunberg notes that there are many forms of blogging -- from the stiffly formal campaign blogs to the what-I-ate-today kind of personal diary popular at livejournal.com, but he focuses his attention mostly on those A-list sites that "traffic in commentary about politics, culture or technology" -- sites like Instapundit and Wonkette. (Hello, Geoff, what about the Beav???)

Nunberg describes the language of these blogs is a type of "anti-journalese, informal, impertinent and digressive, casting links in all directions." But he finds some troubling issues in the collective conversation of the "blogosphere":

If there's a new public sphere assembling itself out there, you couldn't tell from the way bloggers address their readers -- not as anonymous citizens the way print columnists do, but as co-conspirators who are in on the joke. Taken as a whole, in fact, the blogging world sounds a lot less like a public meeting than the lunchtime chatter of a high school cafeteria, complete with snarky comments about the kids at the tables across the room.

After breaking down blogging's cultural and literary history, including distant print predecessors to the likes of blog-pioneers Mickey Kaus and Camile Paglia, Nunberg goes on to express concern about the exclusionary aspect of blogs:

The high formal style of the newspaper op-ed page may be nobody's native language, but at least it is a neutral voice that doesn't privilege the speech of any particular group or class. Whereas blogspeak is actually an adaptation of the table talk of the urban middle class. It isn't a language that everybody in the cafeteria is equally adept at speaking. Not that there's anything wrong with chewing over the events of the day with the other folks at your own lunchtable but you hope that everybody in the room will keep reading the same newspapers at breakfast.

Aw, he sounds like just another bitter old-media type. Heh.