Blogs are the new crap. People with nothing to say have all of a sudden been given a voice, and they’re just lapping it up. Academics and experts spend decades getting to know their area and becoming respected enough to be listened to. So why should bloggers get there straight away and with no credentials?
And what they say is always written as if they’re right. You can always tell a lot about a person by their blog site. The most egocentric refuse to allow people to post comments in case they get scrutinised by someone who knows what they're talking about, while those paranoid that they might be wrong give themselves the ability to moderate them. The very fact that they choose to hide behind a blog in order to make their pitiful, opinionated views known shows the degree of their cowardice.
Who’s going to listen to them? There are so many blogs that the vast majority go unread. Bloggers either flatter themselves that their blogs are so good that people might want to read them, or they’re kidding themselves with the fantasy that some day they’ll be famous. I suppose it’s the subtext that blogs are like diaries that is supposed to attract readers. But people largely live such boring lives, why would anyone care what they have to say? Anyone with an interesting life is hardly going to be the sort of person who sits at a computer many times a day writing entries for a likely audience of one – themselves. Psychologists would say that blogs are a symptom of paramasturbatory psychosis, where the writers pleasure their minds with the fantasy of importance in order to replace the sex that they’re not getting. I’m inclined to agree. Blogging is just another outlet for a huge ego – except that, while the stardom afforded to producers of pop music, football and textile fashion is limited to a select few with supremely large egos, everyone has the ability to set up a blog.
It is the very fact that the Blog is so easy to start that shows it up for being a suspect medium. Talent is fostered from ability and practice, and makes itself known out of competition, reputation and self proof. Furthermore, a lack of anonymity causes people to have to back up what they say, and (thus) to have something worth contributing to the world, lest they be ridiculed, ignored and accountable. Even newspapers have to be careful about what they say or face getting into trouble. Yet blogs can be written both anonymously and freely, taking these very effective and worthwhile quality-checking mechanisms with them.
Unaccountability is a dangerous thing. Obviously, that someone might write convincingly doesn't make them right. Nevertheless, people have an unfortunate and pervasive tendency to be taken in by what sounds convincing. This is because people largely do not like to use their brains, and instead want to be told things to believe in, so that they don't have to. This potentially makes the world of the Blog a very dangerous one indeed.
Technorati is a site that, amongst other things, rates blogs in a chart according to popularity. Ironically, that what is considered "number 1" is by its nature very unlikely to deserve any such credence.
Let me explain...
The blogs that get higher ratings are those that get the most comments posted to them. But such blogs are likely to be popular in this way because of any of the following reasons:
The blog makes stupid comments that are flamed frequently.
The blog is merely a gimmick that attracts the press's attention, which attracts the people's attention.
The blog attracts like-minded stupid people whose comments support the stupid points that the blog makes. There are far more stupid people than clever people, so the stupid people are likely to win on sheer quantity.
On the outside, it seems that the invention of the blog aids a noble cause – that people should be given a voice to speak out against what’s bothering them, so that their views can be known and, if enough sympathy and influence is gained, something can be done. But consider this: If you give people a voice, they’ll use it. Those who get heard are those with the loudest voices and strongest views. And those with the loudest voices and strongest views are virtually always the most opinionated. And of all people, the opinionated are ultimately the most dangerous people to have a voice afforded to them, particularly when you give them the guarantee of anonymity and the freedom of expression.
1 comment:
This is brilliant, and original, even the bits I came up with (or not just because they're my ideas).
And because blogs are everything that is vacuous about the Internet (it is a pity no one will read this one to appreciate the irony), it does damage and dilution to serious thought and political discussion when some serious journalist thinks they are being cool or getting to a new audience when they write a blog; no they are just wasting some time they might have spent writing a real journal, getting paid for a serious published article, doing some other socially useful work, or, if they had anyone, spending time with people they care about or doing a hobby.
Blogs are like much online "content": obscene, and offensive in idea alone, as well as substance. It is everything that is purely bad and chaotic about so called democracy, in fact, it is a good example of why other forms of democracy don't work: just a load of ill-educated sexually frustrated ranters, and cancerous egoed immature girls who want to believe they are famous and everyone is reading their gossip.
And like the entry says, experts take years of research and publications to get a reputation, and now, if they were required to write a blog, chances are, like everything else on the internet, the well-thought out stuff is lost in the piles of shit.
This is the same as all democracy. Or like in America, where which ever violent thugish group shouts loudest and threatens violence decides elections by shouting over the intelligent socialist and scaring people in to line.
That is why we need the two-tier internet I proposed earlier.
To all people who write a blog with maybe one obvious exception (this can be simply elevated to a special website for social comment) I wish everyone who "does a blog" would empty their bowls, wipe their arse, and flush, then get on with your lives, and leave the internet bleached clean, so when we search we just get that blue coloured fresh truth from the cistern and not a back log (blog) of shit.
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