'Kid with modem' a new Gutenberg?

Here's one to think about -- it's titled "Kid with Modem vs. CNN," and it's by, well, a kid with a modem in Beijing, China, who wrote it for That's Beijing magazine and posted it Jan. 5, 2004, to Danwei, which bills itself as a "website about media, advertising, and urban life in China." Obscure enough?

But from this odd corner of the English-speaking world comes an interesting and, I think, very thought-provoking take on new media.

Goldkorn, who is originally from Singapore, says the world of weblogs is creating a "publishing revolution ... and it's not being funded by venture capitalists nor by the nameless powers that hippies call 'the media'." A revolution, eh? Pretty strong language, isn't it? Well, Goldkorn says it's justified. And I think he makes his case.

That's partly because he doesn't try to hype the subject. He admits, for example, most blogs will make your eyes glaze over:

As in the rest of the world, most Chinese blogs are excruciatingly boring accounts of minor incidents in the lives of college students, and breathless comments about new bits of code written by computer nerds. But there’s other stuff too: well-written observations of daily life in big cities like Beijing but also in small towns that you've never heard of in rural Zhejiang.

And then there is Mu Zi Mei, a young Guangzhou journalist who kept a blog about her one night stands, sometimes naming names and rating performance."

I've never heard of Zhejiang, or Mu Zi Mei for that matter, but what Goldkorn says about them rings true, as well. It also rings true, sadly, that Mu Zi Mei lost her job when word got out about her blog. The same thing happened to a House Republican staffer in Washington, D.C., when she evaluated her associates' performance on a blog.

Then there's this. As Goldkorn puts it:

So where are blogs going in China and elsewhere? You can’t really listen to most bloggers about the subject because they tend to view everything through the prism of their current site traffic, which is about as relevant to the future of media, the Internet and everything as a wok full of cold fish. It is probably better to forget about the word blog which is just the jargon term du jour, and think of it this way:

In Europe, Johannes Gutenberg's invention of a printing press that used movable type in 1436 brought down the price of printed materials and made such materials available for the masses, paving the way for mass literacy and enabling reading and writing to spread way beyond the enclosed walls of the monastries of the dark ages.

In the early 21st century, online publishing technology allows a kid with a modem to compete with CNN for your attention. Wherever the kid is, wherever you are.

Wherever we are, too.