What me worry?
I hadn’t cruised blogdex in a while, so I had a look tonight. The end is near. Michael Moore is a gaseous windbag. Lots of links to the big, reliable [sic] media centers like FoxNews and Wired. No links for me, thank you.
Channeling the ghost of Thomas Carlyle, I have grave doubts about these link-lumping strategies. What does it really say? The mass of the public, bloggers included, are idiots? Now there’s a news-flash. So much for my positive feelings about the Internet tonight. I made it to #128 without finding a single item of interest to me. I suppose I’ll stay in my closed social circle, and read them instead because they say far more interesting stuff. Interesting to me, at any rate. I’d rather read about Shauny’s weekend, or Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, which coincidentally was one of those books my father forced me to read before he would even talk to me, or the weather in New Jersey than any of the crap people are linking to at this hour.
Content industry taking over the web? Taken from the standpoint of popular trend, I suppose so. However, looked at from the perspective of a surfer who seldom visits the “content industry” unless somebody else I trust links to it, I doubt it. I like people. That’s why I’m here, and vocal. I work out stuff in my head as I go. I forgot there were so many conservative warmongers out there. I hadn’t looked for a long while. I like to hang with the good people.
Somewhere around #78 was a piece on Kuro[something, I can never get these fucked-up web spellings right] about the end of the Internet. Corporations will end the free exchange of information over the Internet. Just like the phone company prevents conspiracies conducted over the phone, and dirty phone calls. Give me a break. There’s something happing here, and what it is… well, I’m with Weinberger, I’d like to figure out what it is.
One thing is certain though. The pattern of rhetoric practiced since the dawn of time is largely agonistic. We provoke confrontations, arguments, and such. We debate our positions, like combatants in an arena. There’s no rosy and free utopia waiting around the corner, though we always want one. In order to institute change, it will mean the discovery of new sorts of rhetoric. One can adopt the utopian vision, and work toward it, tempered with the sort of healthy skepticism that Turbulent Velvet has expressed, or people can surrender their space to the model of the “content industry.”
Not here, not tonight. Perhaps it’s too much wine, but I’m feeling particularly angry at finding so little beyond my circle of “friends” to enjoy. No links to the content industry from me.
