The great uniter?

Will "new media" and blogs be the forces that unite us in a common culture? Terry Teachout thinks so:

It may be that blogging will encourage the creation of a new kind of common culture, exerting something of the same unifying force as did the old middlebrow media (and as About Last Night seeks to do). Or not: if the experience of political blogs is any indication, blogging may be more likely to foster discrete subcltures of shared interest, larger and more cohesive but nonetheless separate. The question then becomes whether the memberships of these subcultures will overlap to any substantial degree. I think they will--that, in fact, they already do. . . . At the same time, however, I still feel the need for a common space in which Americans can come together to talk about the things that matter to us all. And so my hope is that the blogosphere, for all its fissiparous tendencies, will evolve over time into just such a space.

The quote is from TT's latest essay in Commentary. Read the entire piece, "Culture in the Age of Blogging," here.