But what interests me even more is the intellectual framework writer Jonathan Dee imposes on the proceedings. While there certainly appears to be a personal element involved for Johnson — one Dee apparently wasn’t quite able to crack — there is also the possibility that events occurred as they did because the Internet elevates the importance of links and the act of linking, opening the possibility for the forging of novel (and possibly false) relationships. On the Internet, the possibility of creating new contexts is limited only by any one person’s imagination. It’s impossible for me to say whether this is true in Johnson’s case, but Dee at least presents a persuasive case.

Key excerpts:

Whatever you think of him, Johnson is a smart man, a gifted synthesizer of information gathered by other people. But just as for anyone in his position, there is an inevitable limit to what he can learn about places, people, political organizations, etc., without actually encountering them. Instead of causes and effects, motivations and consequences, observation and behavior, his means of intellectual synthesis is, instead, the link: the indiscriminate connection established via search engine. …

Regardless of whether Johnson’s view of Vlaams Belang is correct, it is notable that the party is defined for him entirely by the trail it has left on the Internet. This isn’t necessarily unfair — a speech, say, given by Dewinter isn’t any more or less valuable as evidence of his political positions depending on whether you read it (or watch it) on a screen or listen to it in a crowd — but it does have a certain flattening effect in terms of time: that hypothetical speech exists on the Internet in exactly the same way whether it was delivered in 2007 or 1997.

Fans of Don DeLillo may recall the final pages of his 1997 novel “Underworld” (no relation to the graphic novels, film series nor English techno artists) where the characters Sister Edgar and J. Edgar Hoover are joined for eternity in cyberspace, “a single fluctuating impulse now, a piece of coded information. Everything is connected in the end.” Well, I did, anyway.

Meanwhile, Dee makes a secondary point that this blurring of context may contribute to a conflation of conflicting perceptions which one may find too often in online discourse:

Not only can the past never really be erased; it co-exists, in cyberspace, with the present, and an important type of context is destroyed. This is one reason that intellectual inflexibility has become such a hallmark of modern political discourse, and why, so often, no distinction is recognized between hypocrisy and changing your mind. …

The soundest conclusion seems to be that he has indeed changed his mind — less about issues (though there are a few, global warming chief among them, on which he will admit to having gradually reversed positions) than about the people with whom he is willing to share the stage, or, perhaps, about his willingness to share the stage at all. Not that changing your mind, even in today’s political environment, makes you into some kind of intellectual hero. People change their minds all the time, for all kinds of reasons.

I cannot say that is what is happening here — I’m certainly not about to be pulled into a discussion of Vlaams Belang. And while misreadings of intentions are not new to online discourse, I think there is a “flattening effect” or, to borrow a metaphor from television, “time-shifting” of opinion which can sometimes confuse more than enlighten. Such confusion may be innocent, but it is also open to exploitation. With no information online separated by more than a few clicks, anyone can choose their own context. And in the blogosphere, some choose contexts incompatible with others’ — even if only for the sake of argument.

And so begins another search for another voice somewhere to the right of at least David Brooks.* That is, assuming the Times even chooses to do so: the Times had no self-identified conservative columnist for a number of years before hiring Brooks and it’s not necessarily a given that another will be hired on. Libertarian John Tierney himself spent a few months on the op-ed page before deciding he’d rather write about science anyway. If we’re judging by Kristol’s tour, the Times needs to scratch a bit deeper and find a voice from someone not standing in line for the Acela Express.

I’m reminded of the Times’ decision a few years back to move its opinion columnists behind a pay wall, an experiment called TimesSelect that proved to be mercifully brief. I suppose the idea was that because Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd et. al. were the Times’ most familiar faces they were therefore its the most valuable asset, which people would pay for. They assumed wrong, and in fact got it exactly backward. Newsgathering and reporting is still newspapers’ “killer app” and if anything, the Times should have been charging for that**; meanwhile, the value of opinion journalism has been in free fall since approximately 2001. There are many pundits who arose in the blogosphere, without first working in journalism (although some were later acquired). Kevin Drum, Ed Morrissey, Bob Somerby, Rick Moran, Jim Henley, Megan McArdle, Glenn Greenwald and Steven Den Beste come to mind.

So maybe the New York Times should be looking out into the blogosphere for its next columnist. Aziz Poonwalla, himself a veteran blogger, had the same idea already and has put a recommendation to it:

I am of course biased because he is my friend, but I think that Joshua Treviño meets and exceeds the criteria above and would in fact be the ideal advocate for the conservative movement in the Obama era. Josh was a speechwriter for the Bush Administration, served in the Army, and had a brief stint at the Pacific Research Institute, a mid-level conservative think tank. Josh was one of the original conservative bloggers, including founding RedState.com (though no longer associated with them). He currently is running his own media consultant firm, and has had numerous media appearances on television and guest columns at National Review.

Seriously, why not? Although I should note that I count myself as a friend of Treviño’s as well, I think this is an excellent suggestion. Poonwalla mentions Treviño as “one of the original conservative bloggers” but doesn’t elaborate, so I will. Treviño was the proprietor of Tacitus.org, an intellectually conservative-minded blog that somehow managed to attract a left-leaning readership. I’d think the New York Times would have to consider that a real advantage. He is not widely known at present, sure, but that can be chalked up as merely an accident of him not writing for the New York Times. Not yet, anyway.

To those who say: “Who cares about the New York Times?” I say: I’m sure it feels good to say, but that’s no reason to abandon a chance to tell your story. And to those who say the Times is doomed anyway, I say: there are other things the New York Times can learn from the web, but those will have to wait for another post.

*And it would be perhaps uncharitable of me to note that I found Brooks rather more interesting in The Atlantic and Weekly Standard, where he had freedom to devote more time and resources to a topic, but I don’t mean to be uncharitable.

**I forget who suggested a temporary pay wall for news, such that corporate and institutional subscribers would pay to get the news first and then all the rest of us free riders could read it later, but it made sense. Reporting is expensive, so get a return on it.