Andrew Schenkel’s blog, Earth Matters, singles out Texas today as the state with the largest number of lawsuits filed against the Environmental Protection Agency. The governor, Rick Perry, who assumed the position when George W. Bush left to become President, and has just begun his third term, has filed 7 lawsuits against the EPA in the past 9 months. The blogger describes the article in the Arizona Daily Star and its comparison of Texas’s adversarial relationship with the EPA to California’s continued implementation of the agency’s regulations as they make progress in their efforts to curb pollution.
As most bloggers do, Schenkel gathers information from the Internet in order to prepare an article that proves his point to his readership. The (well-documented) concern this raises is that I am directed to a very limited number of articles on his chosen topic each day. His post is well organized, though, with a statement explaining the genesis and main focus of the article, then several examples of the ways in which Texas state officials have challenged the EPA’s authority, one statement made in response by an EPA official in August, and a short list of other states and actors who have recently made similar challenges, leading him to conclude that Texas is the loudest, but not the lone voice in the fight against EPA regulations.
Unfortunately, (and this brings me to a very general remark about the nature of blogs) organization and structure, while crucial, are somewhat devalued in a style that uses hyperlinks throughout an article to establish credibility or believability. Personally, I do not feel better off with the ability to stop reading a post each time something needs verification or attribution in order to read a separate article, which could link me to others, and so on and so forth until the end of the Internet. What is the desired outcome for bloggers? Is it simply the most efficient way to attribute sources and the easiest way for readers to see for themselves? Do they believe that most readers will visit linked pages as they go, thereby destroying the flow of the original post? Does anyone think that people will hold out and click on all of the links after having read the entire post? Do they think that the mere presence of links is enough for most people to view the blog as credible, and that many readers won’t even bother checking the source of the information? I suppose they may just understand and accept that this is the prevailing format for the medium, but I think they must cringe at the thought of people reading their work in such a disjointed way…like musicians whose carefully crafted albums are now downloaded piecemeal from iTunes.
MNN’s state pages are an interesting component of Schenkel’s blog. The network has created pages on their site for each American state, and readers can link to them any time Schenkel mentions one to learn about the state’s energy and political issues, local correspondents, resources and “top green businesses,” among other things. This is certainly one way to foster interest in your website, and it can give the reader a sense of the state’s recent history as far as energy issues are concerned. However, it strikes me that each state’s name is linked to its MNN page, as though these pages present the state as an entity, rather than the state in the context of a green blog.
In short, the use of links seems to me to fraught with potential issues and, although I appreciate the direction they provide, I fear I may be too linear for this medium.
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