Book Review

On The March with Slings and Arrows

How modern technology and alternative media are turning the tides

The story of David and Goliath is one of the most recognizable stories of the Bible and one frequently used to convey the idea that being small has its advantages. Blogger Glenn Reynolds makes reference to the story in his new book, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths.

Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and one of the early adopters of blogging, argues that new technologies have given individuals unparalleled power to influence sectors once the exclusive purview of large organizations. A virtual “Army of Davids,” armed with personal computers and their own expertise, is on the march, challenging mainstream media (MSM) and other big organizations.

Some reviewers have called Reynolds’s writing style “conversational,” and it is. The 268-page book, excluding notes and index, is a quick and engaging read. Reynolds’s prose style is just as absorbing as the ideas themselves. For example, he analogizes his beer-brewing hobby with blogging. As mass-produced beer, which has to appeal to the broadest market possible, tends to be “thin and flavorless,” mass-produced news and opinion journalism has become thin and flavorless.

Reynolds begins An Army of Davids at the appropriate point: prehistory. For much of human history, he asserts, the individual was “empowered” because he had few other choices. People tended to live farther apart and in small groups. They had to hunt their own food and make their own clothing. People moved closer together as agriculture improved, but for the most part, things were done on a small scale. The Industrial Revolution, however, shifted the paradigm. “Improvements in organization, communications, and machinery meant that it was often much more efficient to do things on a large scale than on a small one,” he writes.

In other words, bigger was almost always better until the “desktop revolution” shifted the paradigm again. The affordability of the PC and rapid advances in computing power equipped individuals with the tools to do what they’d only dreamed of doing before: gather and synthesize a large amount of information quickly and easily. With millions of pages of information indexed on the web (not all reliable, of course), we have unprecedented access to resources. Sitting in a pizza bar with a laptop and free wireless Internet hook-up, Reynolds writes, “I have most of human knowledge at my fingertips.”

Reynolds provides a wide range of examples how new technologies empower individuals, from helping amateur musicians distribute their online music to the masses without record companies to allowing private citizens to respond to terrorist attacks and disasters better and more efficiently than the government.

New technologies can and are used for nefarious purposes, too. An Army of Davids covers such abuses as terrorists engaging in cyber warfare and the possibility that nanotechnology, (“manipulation of matter at the atomic and molecular level”), a topic Reynolds blogs about frequently, could be used as “disease” agents or that nanobots could “hide out in people’s brains.” (hat tip to Michael Crichton!). The positive aspect of nanotechnology is its potential to repair cells damaged by radiation or destroy cancer cells or deliver oxygen to the brain to protect from drowning. The possibilities – and abuses – are endless.

An Army of Davids veers off into topics like video games and space exploration, but Reynolds’s most interesting predictions surround the clash between bloggers and MSM. Perhaps I’m biased because I’m a blogger, but my favorite chapter was “From Media To We-dia,” where Reynolds briefly mentions such scandals as “Rathergate” and John Kerry’s phantom Christmas in Cambodia, exposed by bloggers.

Blogs won’t be the death of MSM, but the impact of blogs on journalism can’t be understated. At the very least, bloggers are gadflies, fact-checking news articles and opinions and self-publishing the results. Reynolds predicts those with the power to set the agenda won’t just give it up without a fight. Say you want a revolution? “Be ready to fight for it,” Reynolds writes. He then continues:

[T]he press establishment’s general lack of enthusiasm for free speech for others (as evidenced by its support for campaign finance ‘reform,’) suggests that it’ll be happy to see alterative media muzzled.

As more bloggers move away from the “rant and rave” and gadfly models and toward original reporting, I suspect the antagonism between journalists and bloggers will abate. Alternative media, bloggers, entrepreneurs, and other Davids won’t put an end to “Big Media” or big corporations, but as Reynolds says, the shift in power does “represent a dramatic reversal of recent history, toward more cottage industry, more small enterprises and ventures…”

How appropriate that Reynolds chose a religious reference to illustrate this. He also compares new technology to the invention of the printing press and the Protestant Reformation. “[P]ower once concentrated in the hands of a professional few has been redistributed into the hands of the amateur many.” With the invention of the printing press, individuals suddenly gained the power to communicate with the masses without interference from the gatekeeper. The same can be said of blogs.

An Army of Davids is optimistic about the future of technology, and Reynolds’s passion is contagious. The army is advancing, but unlike the real David, the virtual one won’t cut off Goliath’s head, nor should it. Reynolds predicts that media will move to collaborate with bloggers. Some news organizations already have, incorporating “citizen journalism” into coverage of disasters such as the Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina.

Generally speaking, however, the gatekeeper will fight to maintain its fortresses. But the gate is hanging by its hinges, battered by too many virtual Davids with nothing but their slings and stones.

Originally published March 27, 2006, at Townhall.com

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