To Arianna, the Message IS the Message

The Huffington Post is the hottest blog going, all LA cool and stuff. She was chided recently about publishing text that was “from George Clooney’s blog” but was really written by a publicist. How shocking!

“First of all, is the blogosphere powerful or what? As has been endlessly noted, the Clooney blog was drawn from answers he had given in interviews with the Guardian and on Larry King. Neither of which garnered much, if any, reaction.

But, some have asked, is a blog still a blog if it contains repurposed material? My answer is: absolutely. Who cares if the ideas were first expressed in a book, a speech, a play, or an interview? The medium isn’t the message; the message is the message. With the right medium providing the needed amplification.

We live in an age of information overload. We’re bombarded with words and images from our 500-channel universe and the infinite Internet. We’re obsessed with the newest, the latest, the freshest. And what was said yesterday is old news. In this kind of atmosphere, it’s all-too-easy for important ideas to be lumped in with the disposable ones and deleted from our internal hard drives.

Indeed, that was the reason I asked George Clooney to blog in the first place. Not in order to add a celebrity to our blog roll but because I felt the ideas I’d heard him eloquently express in interviews bore repeating in a different, new, and contagious forum. Particularly his critique of Democratic cowardice in the run up to the war.”