4-6-06

New Media Part 5:  From: spartacus.com via: spartacus.net>>spartacus.web:  "I Am Spartacus"
Okay, so I've had a week to think about it.  What, then, is the "Blogosphere"?  And the answer is:  I don't know.
          Here's my problem:  the word "blogosphere" is loosely applied to a vast and random collection of inter- and unrelated blogs, live journals and complete websites.  Some of them are really just online diaries.  Others attempt to follow one theme or another.  Still others are loose collections of the essays and ramblings of two or more contributors.  Some are solid professional sites with multiple daily entries and guest columnists.  Technically, the "Notes" column here on Casual Notice is a blog.
          In many ways, it reminds me of the early nineties when everybody was mass-mailing "family newsletters" to every breathing being they were even remotely related to, including goldfish.  The main difference being that the majority of bloggers don't wait until Christmas to spew out their most intimate thoughts, and, of course, the editors of the New York Times wouldn't be caught dead distributing 500-word diaries festooned with Print Shop graphics and badly-printed photographs.  They do, however, have a reporters' and editors' blog.
          There are hundreds of thousands of blogs out there.  There are cooking blogs, smoking blogs, non-smoking blogs, blogs for people who need to watch their weight, blogs for people who are naturally thin despite eating the equivalent mass of an entire cattle ranch at every meal (bastards), blogs about being a persecuted minority, blogs about not actually being a persecuted minority but feeling like you are because you're a little odd and the CSI about your oddness was offensive to you (and they got it all wrong), tons of blogs for high school and college kids to whine on and on about how their parents are stupid and their friends don't understand them and whah whah whah...
          Luckily, when the Media (either New or Main Stream) refer to the "blogosphere" what they generally mean are the multitudes of political blogs on the net.  This is where diversity gives way to dualism, and overwhelming variety gives way to mind-numbing repetition.  If you pick any five political blogs at random on any given day, four of them will be commenting on what the fifth one said in his blog.  Mind you, you won't always realize that's what's going on until you follow the links.  And, if you ever want to glean any information from the blogosphere, you have to follow the links, because sometimes they don't actually go anywhere.  You'll see a blog about how Michelle Malkin eats five children every day for lunch and click the reference link that leads you to a Democratic Underground entry that says she probably eats five children for lunch which links to a Daily KOS entry that paraphrases her as saying that children don't deserve lunch and leads to an entry on Arianna Huffington's site that quotes her as saying nobody gets a free lunch and may or may not refer to the actual interview or story where she's purported to have said it, whether or not she ever actually did.  The conservative blogs do the same thing, but Malkin is much less likely to sue me for using her as an example than Al Franken would be, because Malkin has a sense of humor (that's not to suggest that Franken, a world renowned comedy writer and improv actor, doesn't have a sense of humor; I'm sure he's quite funny, so if you're one of his lawyers, put down that defamation boilerplate right now).
          Actually, the rest of the blogger world isn't much better.  The webcomics "community" has a huge hissy fit every two weeks or so about something that Burns said in Websnark, or Krahulik or Kurtz said in their respective News blurbs.  Actually its worse than the political blogs; they just spend a few days contemplating Malkin's eating habits, and discussing whether she's actually being given children from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo or whether she has to purchase them from the secret torture prisons in the Czech Republic.  In the Webcomics sphere you get at least a week, sometimes more of elaborate accusations combined with hurt feelings and recriminations and thousands upon thousands of comments on the "oppressed artist" and the "infinite canvas".
          It's an infinite canvas of...well...not crap...there's actually a lot of good thought floating around the blogosphere.  It's just that it can be terribly hard to find.  Look at it as a bunch of drunken college kids sitting around one night discussing the ultimate nature of the universe.  There may be some real insights, but most of what comes out of people's mouths will just be bullshit.
          And you probably won't remember the good bits when you recover from the hangover, anyway.