12.21.2006

We are all blobbers now.

Whiplash! I go to bed last night Person of the Year (yeah, you too...everybody, I guess...You...even this moron Joseph Rago from the Wall Street Journal) and wake up a blobber (a sobriquet formulated 8.36 instants ago by Shakespeare's Sister here), a member of the Blog Mob and blogs, Rago says, are "written by fools to be read by imbeciles." Yeah. You too, you You. I'm sorry, I really am. I tried an Asprin but it doesn't help. Rago, himself, is a "journalist."
The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.

Whoa! What's up with that!

True enough, there are plenty of tasty scraps on the bellies of the so-called MSM - yum! - and yeah, I suppose the Wall Street freakin Journal requires journalists although that's not entirely clear, I'll just have to take your word for it, Rago. But how exactly does that apply to me? I don't see no "journalist" in my profile there. Do you?

"The technology of ink on paper is highly advanced, and has over centuries accumulated a major institutional culture that screens editorially for originality, expertise and seriousness," Rago whines (expertly and seriously), but...
Of course, once a technosocial force like the blog is loosed on the world, it does not go away because some find it undesirable. So grieving over the lost establishment is pointless, and kind of sad. But democracy does not work well, so to speak, without checks and balances. And in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we've allowed decay to pass for progress.

Sheesh. If I didn't have to work this morning I would just, so to speak, go back to bed.

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