Are blogs for the braindead or are they something useful?
by Nick van der Leek
Blogger. I’m sorry but the way that word sounds just doesn’t inspire me. It makes me think of someone who habitually walks around banging his or her head against random walls.
But that’s who I am, and now that I think of it, perhaps the name (and the way it sounds) isn’t so far off. I don’t really identify with the Blogging tribe though – at least who I think they think they are. They remind me too much of People-In-Advertising. PIA’s remind me of celebrities except that instead of being famous for being on Everybody Loves Raymond, or The Cosby Show, they’re supposedly ‘well known’ for being the account executive (but usually some marketing babble-term) somehow linking them to some or other product, and because the product is popular, by inference, they must be.
In the same way, someone who makes their social barometer, their popularity, the site meter on their website, has got to have a screw loose. Sure, I get a kick out of seeing my counter hop from 32 566 to 32 657 over the weekend, but I get a much bigger kick out of eating pizza, taking a good photograph of a baboon, or having sex with my girlfriend.
Blogging has some importance for me, because it is about these two or three things:
1) writing (and hopefully good writing) and photography (ditto)
2) communication (and hopefully sometimes communicating something someone wants to and sometimes needs to hear)
And integral to blogging is that it is a way to spread the word on vital issues that go unreported, or under-reported. One of those is our World Energy Scenario. That’s a world-crucial issue that will be resolved (and probably not resolved) in our generation.
Once again, with oil prices diving, people think the Party Is About To Start Again. Blogs are a powerful way for diverse individuals all over the world to share microeconomic and microclimatic events, and plenty of other events, and start to collate the data and find trends (or lack of). If bird flu ever ravishes the globe, blogs will be a powerful way to communicate without making deadly physical contact with people. We’ll still be able to look and see (with photoblogs) what’s going on. There are plenty of important things that need to be done, and the internet (and blogs) are a powerful tool towards realizing some of our 21st century goals (like ending poverty).
One of the people I encountered at a recent conference on blogging was someone who calls herself MushyPeasOnToast. She dresses a lot like an advertising person, and could be mistaken for some starlet heading towards or just back from some star spangled thingy. I’m all for dark glasses and ‘being cool’, but trying-to-act-celebrity seems to me a dumb motive at the best of times. A lot of people, most people, seem to be in awe of it though. A female celebrity (or celebrity lookalike, or worse, want-to-lookalike) tends to be one thing: sexy. Commonly, unless they’re pornstars, they’re not just sexy, but hard workers that act in roles that communicate some meaningful, or appropriately meaningless message. I’m trying to think of a meaningful movie Uma Thurman made. Gattacca I guess, and then nothing, but I liked her a lot in Kill Bill…perhaps I too needed to expurgate my REVENGE demons. Her crawling out the grave scene inspired me.
But then you have a blogger, who has done anything, and her sole act of celebrity is writing about trying to find dishy men to have sex with and how dumb she is for getting drunk again and again. This must be the most clichéd formula in ditzy blogging, or it soon will be. MushyPeas insisted on not being photographed, but otherwise attracted much attention. At one point I sat beside her and cringed as she started whining about ‘stalkers’. Here’s the rub: you dress like a celebrity, you act like a celebrity, you perform celebrity level debauchery, you broadcast it on the net, and then you want privacy and decency? That’s where the sweet-and-attractive-simulation got stuck. It’s really just egoism and that worst of the consumer impulses: nonstop overindulgence.
My guess is the intention of bloggers like MushyPeas is to attract a plethora of potential sex partners (on the internet), pick and choose the most screwable/entertaining, and write about these experiences, hoping to also capitalize on a book deal. It’s hard for me to imagine a more distasteful character: it’s not only prostituting one’s life, but one’s thoughts, soul etc. When everything you do gets written by you, surely you’re going to contrive to become a contrivance: a marketable (entertaining/sexy) commodity. So then what and who do you become? Is that even human? This is using yourself for public consumption as though the public is: God-with-an-erection. And your mantra to them: come to my website and satisfy yourself by paying attention to me. Something like that.
MushyPeas is a real person, and fairly pleasant in person – sometimes even sweet – and I’m sure somewhere in there is a soul, someone who gets up in the morning and goes to work, who washes her hands, who sips some water, someone who glances up at the sky and thinks a private meaningful thought. And someone who spends quality time away from her computer. She has a real name (one I haven’t mentioned here), and I’d be interested in meeting that person, but not sure if she is real any more, or reachable. I only know her as MushyPeas, but I wonder if she knows who she really is and what she is doing.*
There were plenty of other bloggers who were so addicted to their notebooks they seemed incapable of turning their glazed stares towards the piercing gaze of human corneas. There were also at least 2 people who I spoke to who, when they realized you didn’t shift your whole paradigm (as a result of listening to 2 sentences), felt so spurned, went to sit somewhere else and decided not to talk to you again.
Then there was a likable fella with long hair, who is the epitome of what a blogger should be. Affable, geeky, very knowledgeable (a fellow from Harvard after all), and above all, altruistic. Although American, he demonstrates a terrific love and understanding of Africa. He is confident and overbearing, but also sensitive and clever and patient and sometimes quiet. He is also innovative and fun and friendly, and gets around. He connects, not only over the internet, but over the air – extending his hand and shaking mine.
I liked that he recognizes the true power and value of what is happening with the internet, and appears to be putting it (and his own acumen) to good use.
The internet represents an opportunity for great minds to come together, or for small things to amuse small minds. We can tap the wisdom of crowds, or become a mob of brainless dimwits fascinated by what’s mindnumbingly dumb and ditzy. If we choose the latter, the stereotype will soon emerge of the ‘dumblog’.
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