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Friends, I'm usually about three-to-six months behind the curve on new trends, despite my breathlessly hip-and-happening image. You might assume this is because I am old and mentally fragile, but in truth I've always been behind the times. Even when I was twenty and at the height of my hipster powers, I was usually pretty lame when it came to trends and fads and things that were ‘cool'. Or ‘rad' or whatever the fucking slang term in vogue at the time was. No, I think my lameness has a lot more to do with drinking too much and a fascination with my own Inner World, which is rich and rewarding and of which I am Supreme Overlord, unlike the Real World, where I am a stuttering, socially-awkward mess who works a chumpy little job in a desperate scrabble for survival. Is it any surprise that I often ignore what's going on around me, or that I'm often observed having conversation with people only I can see? Blogs, or web logs, have been around for quite some time, of course, and certainly predate the trendy term Blog by some years. You know what they are: a web site where an individual posts one or all of the following, usually with a time and date stamp: a) news clippings, b) interesting web links, c) personal commentary, d) diary entries. Fucking Blogs. Fucking Blogs should all die. Now, don't get me wrong. Some Blogs I've found to be entertaining and informative. And briefly, I wondered if I shouldn't start a Blog here at innerswine.com, in a desperate bid for relevancy and hipness, not to mention another valuable stream of content to offer you vampires. Especially valuable because it would be bullshit, of which I have an endless supply. I mean, I could post Blog entries about my bowel movements, or people I observe on the bus every morning. Shit like that. This line of thought, however, made me realize how badly Blogs suck–because, in general, that's what Blogs are: The random thoughts of morons, dressed up like something worth reading. Sure, some Blogs are good. The Bloggers are interesting, and intelligent, and well-read. And Blogs are presented to us as the potential of the Internet uncorked. This, it's implied, is why the Department of Defense built the gosh-darn Internet in the first place: So you can spend your time reading the amateurish humor and smarmy inner monologue of complete strangers, many of whom are assholes. That's the problem: Blogs imply that every random thought you have while vegetating at your desk is worth tagging up with metadata and uploading to a weary world. Have you read some of these Blogs? 90% of them are humorous. Nothing wrong with humor, but how many fatuous assholes are we supposed to pay attention to? For every www.defectiveyeti.com that manages that elusive mix of smartassed humor and smarts, you get a hundred people who think that every tedious, tortured thought they manage to squeeze out of their brains is worth putting in a couple of HTML tags and slapping up on a scripted web page. The fact that they all write as if assuming an audience of thousands just makes it all creepy. You see, for most people, and especially most people who write in some capacity in their lives, their daily routines are filled with: thoughts. These thoughts range in quality from truly genius to pure drivel, and most of us readily admit that we have more of the latter than the former, yes? You have an idea in the morning, you chew on it all day, turn it over a couple of times to see what kind of bugs are living underneath it, and then you decide whether or not it lived through the day and is worth nurturing. Blogs tolerate none of that horseshit, bubba. Blogs accept the constant spurting drool of your mind hungrily, and squeak for more. Had a bad commute? Whine about it on the Internet! Have a half-assed political opinion? By all means, share it with the waiting world–but make sure you do so ironically, just in case you're a moron and get your facts all wrong, so you can call it a joke and move on. Fucking Blogs. The Internet is a lot like public access television, if you think about it. Anyone who has the free time and energy can have a web page that, theoretically at least, has the same profile as big money corporations. This is a Good Thing, of course, but that doesn't mean that everything people slap up there is worth your time and trouble. There's been a lot of rumbling about the stranglehold that corporations have on the popular media a'la Britney Spears and her ilk, and how the Internet could break down all those barriers and let anyone who's got a creative itch the opportunity to loose their thoughts and ideas on an unsuspecting world. Is that really what we want? Do you really want your next door neighbor flooding the world with their lame-assed songs/poems/novels? I submit, without any sense of irony about the fact that I myself am flooding the world with a lot of my writing which had proven to be unwanted in the past, that we don't want that. Just because you can write a sentence doesn't mean I want to read it. If you're disagreeing with me, I wonder: How much public access TV do you watch, natch? Wanna taunt me about my lack of wealth, power, and fame? Go ahead. All this negative energy just makes me stronger. Jeff |
February 15, 2003