Tuesday, October 15, 2002 |
02:09 - Mr. X? ...Do I cross the final frontier?
http://www.mikesilverman.com/log.html
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One of the best things that's come out of the link that Lileks bestowed on me on Monday is all the people who have dropped in and said hi, many of whom have their own blogs that I've been checking out in due course. I've been hearing a lot of kind words on everything from my writing style to my taste in psychotic animated cartoons. My head's still spinning, but in a good way, I think. Thanks, everybody.
One such blog, by the way, is Mike Silverman, who's got a number of flattering things of his own to say, and a fine blog to put them in.
Funnily enough, something he said in this same post got me thinking, especially in light of tonight's Simpsons episode, the one from several years ago in which Homer moonlights as an Internet gossip columnist by the name of Mr. X, exposing scandals and shady dealings that the mainstream news is too cowardly or too incompetent to cover properly.
As a side note, finding blogs like this is one of the neatest things about the 'blogosphere' -- it kind of reminds me of the early days of the web, back in 1994 and 1995, when the web was new and exciting, and surfing around looking at people's individual home pages was a lot of fun. You'd go from home page to home page, reading people's opinions, links to their favorite things, maybe a picture or two, and you really got a taste of that person's personality. Most of that early spirit of the web appeared to be long gone, but with the expansion of blogging, I hink it has simply evolved into a new form. Blogging, by its very nature is personal. People's personalities and opinions are what make any blog worth reading. James Lileks said that reading a few of one's favorite blogs is like sitting in a coffee shop with a bunch of smart and interesting friends. Exactly!
...Or, as Lance sneeringly quotes Fritz the Cat, "A bunch of goddamned intellectuals sitting around trying to out-intellectual a bunch of other goddamned intellectuals with their thumbs up their ass." Depends who you ask, I guess.
If you asked Kent Brockman, he would have said that opinions should be left to professional licensed newsmen on TV, not some yahoo with a dancing Jeebus on his web page.
Sure, there's still plenty of Geocities-itis out there on the net. But Mike's right-- blogs have raised the bar, lifting the personal voice back up above the noise that it had almost drowned in. That's what I find interesting about the Internet; it's got no inherent structure of its own, and so it will develop its own architecture just through the act of living and growing. Networks will form of their own accord. Codes of conduct will congeal. Communities will form and split and merge and fork and re-form. And the technologies and the tools will keep evolving, without any limit to their usefulness as long as the interconnected substrate is there.
Whether it feels more like a college coffee shop or a Borg cube is subject to debate. I suspect the jury will remain out for some time yet.
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