As someone whose life was turned upside down when I had the distinct displeasure of being the focus of one of the nanostories that Bill Wasik is writing about in And Then There's This, I was predisposed to by sympathetic to his chapter lamenting the ever-shrinking life cycles of these stories. For those who don't remember, because these stories sink so fast, Melissa McEwan and I resigned from the John Edwards campaign in 2007, because the mainstream media kept humping a story about how we were potty-mouthed and irreverent bloggers who said mean things about Catholics. In truth, we were potty-mouth, irreverent bloggers who made substantive criticisms of Catholic dogma and its negative effective on gays and women, but the nanostory was mostly about bad girls vs. the faithful, and it disappeared under the horizon because Britney Spears shaved her head.

I am sympathetic to his concerns, but I had substantial criticisms after I finished the book. Sadly, Bill's clever enough to anticipate what those objections might be. I was going to argue against the idea that even small nanostories are really irrelevant, or that it's the fault of the internet that these stories come and go. My experience says otherwise. While I would argue that my opinions on Catholic dogma were irrelevant with regards to Edwards' campaign, the truth is that the nanostory was sticky because it feeds a larger, ongoing narrative about how much of our secular society we should sacrifice at the demands of "people of faith", and I was just one in a series of atheists that are being held up to be hated on by the mainstream media. I was also going to point to how the mainstream media really drove the nanostory, and it wasn't just TV, because the AP and the New York Times were also flogging it. In my experience, bloggers usually just react to nanostories, and often they only do so once we realize they're not going away. (I tried, for instance, to ignore the birther thing for a week before I gave in and wrote about it.)

But Bill anticipated my criticisms and conceded both points about the mainstream media and the importance of these stories ahead of time. Harumph. So I'm forced to address his question about how we can focus on the big picture while understanding that nanostories aren't going away.

I'm going to assume, from having firsthand experience, that nanostories take off because they suit the culture of cable news. They want stories that push emotional buttons, but can be summarized in 30 second clips. Even if there's depth behind the stories, that will be obscured in interest of keeping things simple and fast-moving.

Blogs strike me as a useful counterpoint to this. Bloggers can write a lot about a story, explore it from many angles, link to other people talking about it, and present context and depth. Take the birther nanostory, for example. On cable news, the debate didn't really sink below, "Birthers: crazy or what?" But bloggers were able to do the hard work of connecting the birther thing to the bigger picture. Take Ta-Neishi Coates' response to all these events. He was able to use the birther/town hall riot story to tell the larger story of the role that racism plays in stifling social spending in this country, and how much the anger about health care reform really does go back to racist resentment. It's hard to spit out that kind of analysis on cable TV, and worse, it's discouraged. I think the blogs can actually help the process of slowing down and thinking things through.