July 14th, 2008Who’s To Blame?
The Chicago Tribune recently posted an opinion piece (Blah, blah, blog, blog) that tried to rip into microblogging, microbloggers, and pretty much everyone born after 1982. While I might not be big on the whole microblogging segment, I really don’t see why a paper that was once viewed as being one of the better publications in North America would resort to putting something of this quality on their site.
It starts out with a rather apt attempt at emulating what we might find on a person’s Twitter page or something of the sort, then gets right into the whining by saying how people that microblog think they’re more special than anyone else because we were told so right from the they were born. The unnamed author then goes on to say that pretty much every blogger is the same, and we all write the same unnecessarily boring crap with the misconception that people actually care about what we’re doing in the world. While some of us might actually post something now and again to say what we’re doing, it’s really just the younger generation that’s filling their pages with such trivial information.
But is this really something that can be put in the Chicago Tribune as an Op-Ed? Before people could put the mundane details, the exciting developments, the hopes and ambitions, or anything else that’s distinctly human online, we had the telephone. Girls would spend hours on end talking on the phone to friends, despite having just spent the better part of the day with them at school or some other location. Before the telephone was the letter. Before the letter was the face to face. But in every case, the previous methods for communicating have always played a strong part in how we communicate with each other. The newer media just let us do it differently.
What’s particularly interesting is this person’s incredibly narrow view of what blogging actually is. One glaring example of the author’s tunnel vision comes in the following paragraph:
So why blog? A. Bloggers find their lives fascinating; B. They find their lives more fascinating than others do; and C. They want to prove it—by blogging.
Wow … I find my life more fascinating than anyone else’s, which is why I post articles of semi-questionable quality on this obscure and unadvertised website? How interesting that a person who knows nothing about me could be so utterly incorrect. Of all the blogs that I read, there is only one that would fall into the category being painted with such broad strokes, and it belongs to a 32 year old man from Malaysia. Hardly the “Generation Y”, holier-than-thou, more-trendy-than-j00 kind of person that’s described in the very American editorial.
Who’s Number One?
But the unknown author does have a point: a few people do write blogs that talk about absolutely nothing, and these same blog authors are incredibly self-absorbed.
He or she then goes on to talk about a study conducted at San Diego State University that concludes that today’s young people are more narcissistic than any generation before them.
Really? I mean … REALLY?
We had a group of people less than 60 years ago who claimed to be from “The Greatest Generation” and carried the right to go gallivanting about the globe while polluting the planet with Styrofoam cups, 8 cylinder muscle cars, and disposing of just about anything once something better came out. The Greatest Generation made keeping up with the Jones’ a national pastime, for God’s sake. This same group of people then have the nerve to procreate like mad, creating a huge baby boom that will have long-lasting implications for the entire human race, all while believing they did something better than anyone else.
Did I forget to mention that this same “Greatest Generation” are also responsible for making the education system more lax, which has lead to the millions of “dumb youth” they’ve complained about? Did I also forget to mention that this same generation is responsible for first planting the concept of “you can do anything” into our brain?
How foolish we must have seemed! We listened to our elders! Those who said that we’re special and can do great things in the world!
But if we hadn’t listened to those who came before us, we wouldn’t be called “narcissistic.” We’d be called “distant”, “solitary”, “isolationists” or some other term that would grant the Greatest Generation the leave to wipe their hands of the mess they’ve created.
Ah, foolish me for saying anything bad about those who fought in the bloodiest and most preventable war in Human history. Perhaps it’s the result of the piss-poor education they’ve allowed, despite the $20,000 I paid after high school to become the anal-retentive prick that I all-too-often appear to be. Next time I’ll just make racial or sexually-oriented slurs to keep those who came before me happy.
It’s Not All About Us
Whether this person likes or dislikes blogs is really none of my concern. My main beef is with the misconception this paper allows by passing on such ill-researched articles of personal opinion. Heck, the author of this editorial is probably pissed off because they see the younger journalists and average person has a greater reach and more influence than the once great Chicago Tribune.
Print media is dying a slow and painful death, but not because of the internet. Rather than leverage the potential of this information super-highway, a large number of editors and boards of directors are sticking their head in the sand over their coming extinction.
People have blogs for any number of reasons. People post their content for any number of reasons. To say that every single blogger or micro-blogger is just talking about themselves is like saying that every Baby-boomer is selfishly taking advantage of health care. While there are some that certainly reduce the credibility of the masses, they are the exception rather than the rule.
Either way, the Chicago Tribune certainly got what it was looking for. Lots of back-links, and lots of traffic from us so-called self-absorbed and narcissistic fools.
I’m not so sure that’s the reaction the Trib was looking for, actually. I read the article in the print edition, and I know they have comments sections for everything on their site, so I logged on to see what people were saying and add my own voice. But, I couldn’t find the article. There wasn’t a link to it on the opinions page, and it didn’t come up in the search results for “blah blog”. Even more interestingly, there’s no comments section. Google was able to find the article, but I couldn’t.
I have the feeling someone in the online department wanted to bury it.
You’re right on the money about blogs being the new long telephone conversations about nothing. It’s a heck of a lot cheaper, too.
I think the author too much throws all blogs on a single pile by talking about blogs and microblogging in general like that, but in all honesty he does make quite a valid point in my opinion. Too much of the blogging scene is related to writing on what color socks to wear today and how you fucked up your food this time.
It’s not a bad thing though that it’s being done as blogs like that can be a great way to keep in touch with friends, families and loved ones but what does suck is that there’s no real borders within the blogosphere. Niche blogs, personal blogs, splogs and whatever more get thrown on one big pile in which splogs make up by far the majority, quickly followed by personal blogs and niche blogs are really just a minor percentage of them.
When searching around through blog search engines because of that you quickly end up on blogs writing about what color socks to wear to that new james bond movie, a splog trying to catch in on some quick cash whilst you were actually looking for bloggers which saw the movie and bothered to give it a quick review.
But writing about oneself in general definitely is nothing from the generation post 1982 or anything. Way long before that people already carved their names into trees to show they were there or who they loved, they wrote on public property, desks, etc. The mediums for doing so have simply changed and with that become a lot more accessible.
Well, it was listed as being an opinion article. I do agree that the author must be quite uneducated about about this blogosphere and did make some crazy generalizations though!