This is what the blogosphere sounds like when its described by one of the greats of the magazine era, not one of the cool geeks who are building it and, for the most part, populating it so far.

Out of the delirium of Judiana (Gawker’s coinage), a paradigm shift? Out of the welter and whirlwind of exegesis of intelligence leaks comes … redesigned intelligence? An epistemological extreme makeover? [snip]

I think the recent total frenzy of Judiana—the Talmudic, blogospheric analysis of the entire spectrum of speculation, rumor, conjecture in the Plame case and its Judy Miller subplot that has consumed so many of us—may mark the moment when the way we process information has changed in some deeper fundamental way that transcends this particular media colonoscopy, transcends media consciousness and suggests some deep internal realignment of the prefrontal lobes.

What I mean is that whatever the Plame special prosecutor decides—and I write before any indictments have been filed—I believe the escalating online delirium of Judiana and Plame blame-game analysis will be remembered as the moment when more than the media changed. The very nature of literacy, perhaps even the shape and texture of consciousness changed, the way Virginia Woolf declared human character changed in 1910. All that transformative stuff McLuhan predicted might actually come true, although not in a way he had foreseen. It’s no longer about how the Web is changing us, although the Web is a factor. It’s not merely about cyber-connectivity. It’s about internal neural connections and configurations; it’s really about the way the brain may be changing. The way the blogosphere has become a new hemisphere of the brain. Now there’s right brain, left brain and blog brain.

This is Ron Rosembaum in The New York Observer. His colum this week is a minor classic, recounting his breakthrough moment of realization, when he finally grokked the "brain-altering role of the Web."

Rosenbaum should have been down with the internet from the beginning, given his love of meta-meta-ness (comments on comments on comments), his gift for teasing out relationships between apparently unrelated items, his trafficking in obscure niches of wildly original alternative analysis — all things the internet enables in a way big way. He even wrote the celebrated article "Secrets of the LIttle Blue Box" in Esquire in 1971 about phone phreaks, the proto-hackers who could manipulate the telephone network by mimicking system tones (Wikipedia: phreaking).

But at first he didn't get it. In 1999, as he quotes himself in his column, he wrote that "the only unequivocal beneficiaries of wired culture" will be "neo-Nazi pinheads … child pornographers and Bill Gates."

This, even as late as 1999, was pretty much the way the NY magazine intellegentisa felt about the web. And appropriately enough Rosenbaum's put-down was pubilshed in Slate, a web site, sorry, "magazine," whose primary mission has been to make the internet seem safe for people who went to Harvard.

I suspect Rosenbaum's been coming around for awhile. I recall but can't point to (literally, his older pieces are behind an archive paywall) previous columns where he's noted things in passing that he could only have noted had he been spending significant time online, previous columns where he's dropped hints that his regard for the web had changed. He may even have been more explicit at some point, and I missed it.

If only Rosenbaum would take the next step and blog. He's a natural for the medium, but I think that about a number of writers who should be online and aren't (case in point). Still, it's great to have him writing columns like this one. I've bounced back and forth between the NY media world and the online world, and the two worlds seem very close to me, but the Venn diagram of the actual overlap is too small.

Even if Rosenbaum is finally on board, the Observer still has some catching up to do. Rosembaum's column is free online until some point next week, I'm guessing late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning, after which it goes behind the paywall. So run don't walk, read Rosenbaum now, and save the $2.95 it will cost you after that.