“The Sixties were an era of extreme reality. I miss the smell of tear gas. I miss the fear of getting beaten.” - Hunter S. Thompson

Nostalgia is alive and well, and living in the past.

Last week, the two lead stories on BBC Online News Magazine concerned the apparently unrelated subjects of hell-raising and typewriters. The former piece invited us to consider why we are so fascinated by “celebrities behaving badly” - Oliver Reed, Richard Burton, Richard Harris - and whether those particular bad boys achieved legendary status because their excesses were reported after the fact rather than in real time by camera phone.

In other words, is Oliver Reed a legend and Amy Winehouse a loser because it’s only the latter whom we actually saw vomiting in a hotel lobby rather than simply reading about it in the next day’s papers? Or is 24 hour news and blanket celebrity coverage ruining our appetite for hell-raising? And is it all totally sexist anyway?

Meanwhile, the second top story (an oxymoron, but one suited to 24 hour blanket news) focusses on the enduring popularity of the humble typewriter, in the face of personal computing and the Internet. Why on earth would you anyone want to keep - or start, as some apparently are - using an IBM Selectric when they could get an entry-range laptop for next to nothing?

So hell-raising, nostalgia and typewriters - a big news day - and yet not one mention of Hunter S. Thompson, the man almost as famous for his love/hate relationship with his IBM Selectric (which he famously blew apart with a shotgun in a 1989 photo shoot) as he was for his raising of hell.

Actually, the enduring popularity of H.S.T. also speaks to - to use that vile phrase - the fascination we have with old typewriters and old drunks. How much simpler things were back in journalism’s 60s and 70s heyday - the clickity clack of the typewriter with no risk of our words vanishing before our eyes with a careless alert box response. The possibility of getting twatted on Mojitos or bourbon in an upscale hotel bar without the resulting carnage popping up on YouTube. The days before Google allowed anyone to play journalist and we became saturated with unaccountable minutiae and inactionable dullness. Good times. Good times.

This is the world I was alluding to in my piece about Hunter S. Thompson, first published in the Guardian in 2005 but reposted here the other day. A world in which journalism meant logging off, buying the ticket and taking the ride rather than simply buying a fedora and responding to email tips. More trudging, less Drudging, in other words.

The question is whether I was right in calling for a new generation of Gonzo journalists, albeit with a cyber twist. And it’s a question that was answered in the negative by the Guardian’s Neil McIntosh who took me firmly to task (in a comment that I stupidly deleted) - accusing me of looking backwards with misty eyed affection at a man who, in his later days, had become an old bore. Isn’t blogging something entirely new? And shouldn’t it be celebrated as such?

Hmmm. As Thompson would say, that gave me paws. Neil’s a smart guy and he knows a damn sight more about blogging than I do. He has also called me out on things before, except last time I responded in an incredibly twattish and dismissive way so this time the least I could do is actually think before I reply. Not least because maybe he’s right. Isn’t blogging something entirely new? And isn’t it time for us to leave Thompson to rest in peace?

I spent some time in the hammock last night, staring at the stars and thinking about these questions. I even dug out a copy of Kingdom of Fear, Thompson’s last and arguably weakest work (unless you count his ‘Hey Rube’ column on ESPN.com, which by any measure was dreck - Buy The Ticket, Take The Piss, right?) to see where Gonzo was left.

And my totally unscientific conclusion? Is it time for us to let Gonzo go?

Yes, I suppose it is. And no, I suppose it isn’t.

Certainly by the end Thompson was past his prime, and he knew it. In a letter to his ex-wife (later published in Rolling Stone) he wrote “67. That is 17 years past 50, 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won’t hurt.”

Bang.

And certainly blogging is something new, and to be celebrated. For a start, there’s some brilliant writing out there in blogland, and some brilliantly well-informed writing too. Never before in history have so many had access to so much information and so many platforms on which to dissect it. But for the same reason, it has never been so easy to be lazy. Bloggers link to bloggers link to bloggers link to a New York Times story, which was very probably researched on Google, from a blog. Browsing even the biggest current affairs blogs sometimes leaves one feeling like there’s only one print journalist left on the streets and everything else is just Chinese whispers.

The greatest casualty of the 24 news cycle, in my not-so-humble opinion, is the death of the Deadline, which was often considered a negative when in fact it could be anything but. With no deadlines everything is due ‘as soon as possible’ which makes speed of filing king and gives no breathing space for silly things like fact checking or actual reporting. No one wants to get scooped, so it’s easier and safer to watch Sky News and transcribe what you see than it is to secure accreditation to a political convention and spend time getting access to a real story.

That’s the reason why we’re seeing so much interesting non-fiction book publishing (and why the likes of Bob Woodward are more at home in that world) and a significant resurgence of the popular documentary. These things take time to do and so give the journalist both the space and the incentive to tell us something new.

And that was Thompson’s thing. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Hell’s Angels, even Gonzo fiction like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas told us things we didn’t know; introduced us to characters we’d never met and made us think things we’d never thought, rather than just recycling the same old shit. How many bloggers - truly - are doing that today? How much truly new information is this brave new world of blogging actually giving us? What new perspective?

Ooh! Bloggers have access to political conventions! W00t! But, really, how many of them are using that access properly and how many are just overgrown wannabes who have such a massive throbbing hard-on from being allowed to sit down with the grown-ups that they can’t stand up from the table to see what’s going on in the kitchen? It’s kinda pathetic watching blogs like Daily Kos or Free Republic suck off the DNC or RNC and then happily paying them for the privilege by raising cash for their campaigns. That’s not journalism, that’s being a fan site. Or a whore who failed the first module of their business studies GCSE.

And yet and yet. None of that matters a damn if my basic assumption is wrong. If blogging isn’t journalism at all but is instead an incredible new form of unaccountable self-expression, defying any existing categorisation. If that’s the case then my argument is shot through like a Selectric in the snow; there’s no doubt that blogging has allowed a whole generation of writers and diarists who would never otherwise have found an audience for their work to tell their stories. And in doing so it has provided the raw material for a hundred thousand proper journalists to tell a million stories. Bloggers sit at one table and journalists at another and it’s the responsibility of the latter to fact check the stories told by the former - to walk the streets and get the facts right, rather than expecting the bloggers to do any of that leg work. Blogging is amazing and new and exciting and all the rest of that stuff - but it isn’t journalism.

But if that’s the case, then why is it so often the bloggers who are fact-checking the journalists and not the other way around? Something isn’t black and white here, that’s for sure.

The real answer - I think - is that in trying to define (or even more arrogantly, alter) the distinction between bloggers and journalists I was totally missing the point. In fact blogs, like newspapers or TV, are just a choice of medium. There are pundits on TV and columnists in newspapers who don’t have the first bit of real-world experience in the subject they cover. And there are bloggers with Pulitzer prizes on their desks.

What I should have said is that blogs, as a medium, have many characteristics in common with the counter-cultural magazines of the 60s and 70s - magazines like Rolling Stone and Oz which defined a new type of media. And yet while many of the people writing in the pages of those magazines used their brave new medium to carry out journalism that changed the world, there are very few bloggers who are doing the equivalent thing with the even more brave and even more new world they have at their feet. And equally there are far too many who are simply hacking and re-hacking other people’s efforts and yet calling these derivative works ‘journalism’.

Not all bloggers should be carrying on the Gonzo ideal but some should, dammit. And, to my mind, the fact that they’re not is a crying shame - but, crucially, not in the same way that it’s shame the IBM Selectric probably won’t be around twenty years from now or that hell-raising ain’t what it used to be.

Because while marches in technology are rightly and inevitably crushing so many of the things that we look back with fondness on, those same marches - instant communications, mass information availability and a lack of accountability to anyone - could be exactly what is needed to turn Gonzo from a quirky, if significant, journalistic glitch into the cutting edge of modern journalism. Maybe Thompson was a relic - but maybe he actually just an early adopter and that the true era of Gonzo is now.

There’s only one way to find out - and that’s for someone to have the balls to do it. To buy the ticket, to take the ride and to combine the principles of Gonzo and the power of blogs as a medium to raise merry hell in the real political world, rather than just hiding in their bedroom, parroting back talking points.

They might fail or embarrass themselves - in which case let’s leave that giant Gonzo cannon in storage for good. But, if I’m right, then they might equally change the world. Or at the very least introduce to the blogosphere stories as interesting as Hell’s Angels or as entertaining as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

And - nostalgia aside - wouldn’t that be pretty fucking awesome?

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