Sunday, May 15, 2005
 
Prometheus Unhinged
I've been skimming David Greenberg's rather disagreeable posts at Daniel Drezner.com and quietly disagreed them. Little did I realize that Greenberg's excursion into the blogosphere was an anthropoorelitist study where he was Dian Fossey and we were the gorillas. He's published his findings in the peer-reviewed New York Times:
    As I checked other sites for ideas, I now realized that I didn't need only new information. I needed a gimmick - a motif or a running joke that would keep the blog rolling all week. All of a sudden, I was reading other blogs, not for what they had to say, but for how they said it.
And:
    It's not that the readers were dim. Some forced me to refine or clarify my arguments. But the responses certainly got reductive, very quickly. And for all the individuality that blogs are supposed to offer, there was an amazing amount of groupthink - since some of them were getting their talking points from ... other blogs.

    By the end of the week, with other deadlines looming and my patience exhausted, I began to post less and less. There was a piece for Slate due, a book chapter to finish, my baby boy, Leo, to entertain and a piece to write for the Week in Review.
So you see, while he enjoyed his trips to the darkest underbelly of commentary, he had real work to do, and with regret could no longer post to the low quality standards he'd set for himself and the presumably knuckle-dragging readership and commentariat.

Nothing like a little slumming to shore up your liberal cred. Oh, I know, it's under the guise of broadening your horizons or trying something new. If you perform the task with the idea that it will confirm your preconceptions, though, you're probably right--but your horizons are no more broad, and you've really only tried the same old thing.

More at:

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:48 AM
Comments: Post a Comment

<< Home
 
To say Noggle, one first must be able to say the "Nah."