The Added Value of the Internet

In the department of "duh," but it dawned on me today that when I was a student (a long, long time ago), you could not go on-line and read instant analysis of international events by people who only recently were in the policy making trenches themselves. There are many examples, but the piece I was reading was Philip Zelikow's discussion of the new North Korean provocations. (Zelikow was counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice until late 2006 and now contributes to Foreign Policy's "Shadow Government" blog). Having access to this kind of writing, and just as often as not it appears in blogs, is a qualitative difference with the old, print and tv/radio-only days. It's a quantitative difference too (there really is a lot of very useful stuff out there), so you have to learn to navigate the land of bookmarks and links efficiently. Because there's also a lot of crap out there, in addition you need to turn up your crititical thinking a notch or two. And eventually you need to worry about who pays for the critical sites, which are often linked to print publications (the answer here is: until adverstising pays all the bills--and who wants that much advertising?--appreciative readers had better do their part).