An Army of Davids Will Lead Us

Arianna Huffington discusses Glenn Reynolds' New Book

While touching on the seemingly endless arenas in which technology is decentralizing power and transferring it away from giant corporate entities to individuals -- including the arts, business, politics, music, and even space exploration -- Reynolds is especially engaging on the profound shifts in the way news and information are disseminated (not surprising given his place in the blogging vanguard).

"Power once concentrated in the hands of a professional few," he writes, "has been redistributed into the hands of the amateur many... Millions of Americans who were once in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff -- and that many unknowns can do it better than the lords of the profession."

Reynolds also nails how the blogosphere has become an invaluable tool for holding the mainstream media's feet to the fire: "Where before journalists and pundits could bloviate at leisure, offering illogical analysis or citing 'facts' that were in fact false, now the Sunday morning op-eds have already been dissected on Saturday night, within hours of their appearing on newspapers' webites."

Reynolds may be identified with the right, but his central thesis that technology is evening the playing field between the media haves and the media-have-only-a-laptop-and-an-Internet connection crowd cuts across partisan lines.

Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids : How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1595550542/002-0410705-1427224?n=283155


& John Podhoretz NY Post 3.7.2006