Pleonastic Ephemera

2.26.2004 posted by William 21:42 link

The dispute to which this post is in response is hardly relevant to my experience as a blogger in that the chance of someone complaining about my not attributing a link is roughly zero, but the last few graphs got me thinking about the nature of the so-called 'blogosphere'. In 2004, to paraphrase Hanif Kureishi (in an interesting article about an entirely different subject), "Everyone (except of course the mass of the population) has the internet". But even limiting ourselves to the privileged percent of the world population that actually have the means to use the internet, there are a lot of people who don't read blogs or even know what a blog is. Do you have a blog? Who do you know who does? Who else do you know reads blogs? Who doesn't know what a blog is? For a certain segment of the online population, blogs are the second killer app of the internet, behind google. I devote a regular chunk of time to checking various blogs daily or every few days. Their role is indispensible to my internet usage but difficult to describe: an erstwhile hippy might say that, like a shaman, they guide ours trips in the internet. Or you can imagine a media academic writing something like, "Representing the textualization of the DJ, bloggers appropriate and manipulate content from self-selected sources into a linear narrative." (Google 'textualization' and try to grok some of the academic shit that turns up.) The simplest way to say it is that they provide a point of reference in the vastness of the internet more specific and manageable than the universe available through google but less predictable and more organic than a news or other commercial site. And without them, I'd have a very different time using the internet. One portion of the blogosphere is the contemporary equivalent of previous eras' major literary magazines' (and especially their letters pages), according to this post. And by extension at other altitudes there's a layer devoted to music, and one to politics, and entertainment, and of course there's overlap between the layers, in addition to which they're linked by little HREF tags that connect them to each other like jet contrails cross and connect patches of the sky. It seems to me that blogs will settle in as a more or less permanent feature of the internet. They have grown quickly in popularity by replacing the less-than-compelling personal home pages that people created in the early and mid-90s. Those home pages were static and rarely offered more than token content, but blogs provide steady updates and offer a personal take on the internet which turns out to be very useful in a way that search engines never can. Readers rely on their word-of-mouth recommendations to the extent that over time they have returned to develop a sense of the blogger's taste compared to their own just as readers of film, music, and book critics do. They provide a welcome sense of human communication and interaction to the experience of using the internet. And of course, any would-be blogger can hardly be stopped from indulging himself, such is the extreme ease with which tools like blogger and movable type allow them to be created and maintained. Which is why you're reading this. </Pretentious mumbling> I just listened to Mahler's First Symphony for the first time in a while. The coda is like, I almost can't believe this guy was taken seriously, it's so over the top. I gotta get some more of his stuff and see if he spends the rest of his career trying to out-bombast himself. </uh, starting now>