Financial Times - February 18, 2006
Time for the last post By Trevor Butterworth
<snip>
And that, in the end, is the dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts - a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news.
[...]
Accurate, as far as it goes.
Once upon a time, I was, as I've stated before, pretty down on the entire blogging thing. But these days I find myself less intolerant of blogs (and not simply because I'm toying with one) and more impatient with critics of the blog form who are fixated on the following:
* the blog-thing as a competitor with or, as the sillier boosters of the blog-thing shout, replacement for the media
* the blog-thing as an inane explosion of inanity demonstrating the regrettable shallowness of our current moment (in which, due to the oft cited, unprecedented seriousness of the post 9/11 age, silliness is uncalled for – this is a popular argument amongst US and UK critics I've noted)
* the blog-thing as a failed money making enterprise (aka the next dot bust)
In summary:
Not really media.
Far too snarky.
Where's the money?
Just some jackasses' uninformed opinion
These are the four pillars of the fast developing school of blog denunciation.
To which I reply, yes, of course, all these things are indeed true. Why deny them? But they're only true up to a certain point and only as a description of those blogs that contain these elements.
If I'm the writer behind “Giornale Nuovo”
<http://www.spamula.net/blog/>
I'm not falling into any of these traps and so the criticisms lose their credibility. This is surely also true if I'm a theoretical physicist writing for “Not Even Wrong”
<http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/blog/>
or Michael Berube writing on academic life and literary theory -
<<http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php>
or Jean Snow wandering through the streets of Tokyo (because you can't) and writing and podcasting about it
Perhaps some archness and silliness makes its way into my writing if I'm one of these worthies but the world is still big enough for irony, goofiness and their cousins.
The list of blogs that lie far outside the realm of obsessively commenting on something read on MSNBC (then vaingloriously shouting about how 'irrelevant' the 'main stream media' are) is long and growing longer.
And yet, whenever these articles are fashioned and published, we hear – once again – about the four pillars and their crumbling condition (sometimes, you get the impression the subtext is – I'm serious and noteworthy, those idiots aren't).
Nirvana has not been reached and there's still a great deal of stupidity floating about as there always has been and always will be till the sun goes nova (or we find some novel way of offing ourselves before that spectacular event).
Even so, this tactic of criticizing a still developing form by highlighting the dullest contributions is bad form.
Bad form indeed.
.d.
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