Gimlé

Been exposed to a few inane comments on the web and weblogging in the last few days. I’ve also been the recipient of a few comments on weblogs from academics that would either have to be categorized as ‘rude’ or ‘ignorant’ depending on how charitable you feel.

Most of these links are a bit old, the trail is a bit ‘cold’ if you will. Most of you have already read these, no doubt, as they were linked to from enough people. Can’t even recall where I first saw them, myself.

The first one to annoy me was Andrew Orlowski’s piece at the Register where he compares webloggers to Polish teenage girls, claiming that webloggers don’t read, don’t go out, and flatly states that engaging in community debate and structured writing is less social than being a television-watching couch-zombie or going out and getting plastered with a bunch of vomiting frat boys.

Cuz weblogging ain’t social, y’know.

It’s nice to see that when writing is unpopular, intellectuals pick up on bad writing and post-modern masturbatory pseudo-intellectual essays as a hallmark of ‘being smart.’

Now that normal people are given the chance to write, debate and read, those activities suddenly cease to be intellectual activities. While other activities, such as watching television, and getting drunk get redefined by the poseurs as i. Why do you think snobbish, post-modern poseurs like Buffy? It’s self-refential and cancelled, a double whammy for the camp of post-modern, post-ironic, elitist exclusivity.

I might not like the kind of writing that takes place on most weblogs but my gripe is that I want more of it and of a higher quality, not that people should abandon their writing in favour of going out and getting pissed, or collapsing, braindead in front of TV.

And he berates the group he classifies as ‘A-list bloggers’ for not being inclusive in what they put the ‘weblog’ stamp on.

Ars Technica is a weblog in all but name. They’re not a part of the Movable Type/Blogger/Userland/Blosxom gang which is generally what forms our view of that ugly word ‘blog.

But it looks like a ‘blog, walks like a ‘blog, smells like a ‘blog, and so it must be a weblog.

You see, weblogs aren’t revolutionary like the software people like to tell you. After all, part of the reason they’re saying it is because they’ve got software to sell you.

What we’re seeing now is functionally identical to the web we had circa 1995. Personal websites with sporadic updates that use linking technologies to create semantic interconnections. Dialogue and debates taking place over vast distances, aided by that there thing in the corner called a computer.

Weblogs are not a revolution, merely the ‘one step forward’ in a sequence of ‘two steps forward, one step back, one step forward again.’

We’re just getting where we should have been in 1998-1999.

Which leads me up to the comments I’ve been heard amongst serious digital media academics up at college last week.

It seems that some people missed the whole ‘two steps forward’ thing in the first place, let alone the ‘bouncing back after a setback’, thing that the current state of weblogging represents.

People who don’t get that you can have a community engaging in serious, structured debate that is not be a closed, exclusively academic group. That you can have a large collection of professionals, intellectuals and academics all hashing a subject out in a thorough manner, resulting in texts and essays that are better written and make more sense than most journal articles would ever do in their editors’ wildest and wettest dreams.

People who would say that weblogs are merely the ‘usenet writing for the naughties’ if they knew what the usenet was in the first place. People who think that webloggers are sad Star Trek fans without a life writing for other Star Trek fans without a life on websites visited only by Star Trek fans without a life.

People who simply do not understand what online writing is about.

I’d say that it was their loss, except that they’re the people in the way, preventing the rest of us from integrating weblogs and online collaborative writing with university teaching and debate.

If they don’t get it, it won’t happen.

The third comment simply highlighted the ongoing identity crisis that post-modern, semi-intellectual, poseurs are going through these days. “They’re writing about stuff? Intelligently? But isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing?”

It’s exactly these people that are threatened by weblogs, not journalists. Media people, generally get what it’s about, in no seconds flat.

It’s guys like this that will hopefully be out of a job. He makes a bad habit in this essay out of attributing his laziness and poseur ambition to the population in general. Go on, read it. It’ll make you feel happy about yourself. The more you read and write on the web, the more endangered this particular species of animal will be.

In this case we can safely say that it is their loss, while the rest of us continue to browse like it’s 1995.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.