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It’s important to remember that not all blogging is done by social
misfits. In fact, many highly credible academics, professionals and experts blog.
I cite blog commentary regularly in my Casey Reports and Scanning the Horizon
commentaries, as well as postings here.
As Stephen Straker once noted, we often web
log here on FW. In my experience, bloggers themselves are generally responsible, it’s
the comments from readers that get out of hand. It appears that those in the media who have not incorporated
this new medium are more than disdainful of youthful slang and disrespectful
attitudes, although I don’t like coarseness and rudeness for its own sake,
either. Did I read that the WSJ
had some trouble with its shareholders or was that the NYT? It is absolutely
true that the print media is losing readers to internet media. One of the benefits of the internet in general and blogging, in this
case, is the increased openness and transparency it creates in public
discourse. It would have been beneficial to know the real thinking and words of
some of our politicians before they were elected, n’est pas? Certaily, neither
Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld would be the troika they are today if their words and
exchanges had been catalogued and dissected earlier. So I say hooray for more open communication and greater public
discourse. Just learn where to tread and what to avoid. KwC Wonder Land
By Daniel Henninger 1089 words 21 April 2006 The Wall Street Journal Kevin Ray Underwood, the repressed Oklahoma
cannibal, kept an Internet "blog" of his compulsions for years before
kidnapping and killing a 10-year-old neighbor last week. On his blog, Kevin
wrote a lot about Kevin: "The reason for my lackluster social life is a
severe case of social anxiety and depression. I'm on medication now, which
helps a lot. Well, in ways." I don't think the blogosphere is breeding
cannibals. But it looks to me as if the world of blogs may be
filling up with people who for the previous 200 millennia of human existence
kept their weird thoughts more or less to themselves. Now, they don't have to.
They've got the Web. Now they can share. Technorati, a site that keeps numbers on the
blogosphere, reports that as of this month the number of Web logs the site
tracks is 35.3 million, and doubling every six months. Technorati claims each
day brings 75,000 new blogs. We know something's happening here but I'm not
sure we know what it is. Typically, a blogger creates a Web site and
then, in the pale glow of a PC screen, types onto a keyboard what's on his or
her mind. A blog nearly always invites readers to share their
"comments," which they do, and which the blogger posts seriatim.
People in my business tend to think blogging is mostly about politics on sites
such as Wonkette, the Huffington Post or the Daily Kos. There are highly
intellectual blogs, such as the Becker-Posner Blog, run by Nobel economics laureate
Gary Becker and federal judge Richard Posner. Their April 16 post is titled
"Tax Complexity and the Cost of Compliance," with comments. But in a "Blogs Trend Survey" released
last September, America Online reported that only 8% blog to "expose political
information." Instead, 50% of bloggers consider what they are
doing to be therapy. Some might argue that using the Internet to
self-medicate includes many nominally political blogs, but more on that
shortly. Not surprisingly, a new vocabulary has emerged
from clinical psychology to describe generalized patterns of behavior on the
virtual continent. As described by psychologist John Suler, there's
dissociative anonymity (You don't know me); solipsistic introjection (It's all
in my head); and dissociative imagination (It's just a game). This is all known
as digital identity, and it sounds perfectly plausible to me. A libertarian would say, quite correctly, that
most of this is their problem, so who cares? But there is one more
personality trait common to the blogosphere that, like crabgrass, may be
spreading to touch and cover everything. It's called disinhibition. Briefly,
disinhibition is what the world would look like if everyone behaved like Jerry
Lewis or Paris Hilton or we all lived in South Park. Example: The Web site currently famous for
enabling and aggregating millions of personal blogs is called MySpace.com. If
you opened its "blogs" page this week, the first thing you saw was a
blogger's video of a guy swilling beer and sticking his middle finger through a
car window. Right below that were two blogs by women in their underwear. In our time, it has generally been thought bad
and unhealthy to "repress" inhibitions. Spend a few days inside the
new world of personal blogs, however, and one might want to revisit the
repression issue. The human species has spent several hundred
thousand years sorting through which emotions and marginal neuroses to keep
under control and which to release. Now, with a keyboard, people overnight are
"free" to unburden and unhinge themselves continuously and
exponentially. One researcher quotes the entry-page of a teenage girl's blog:
"You are now entering my world. My pain. My mind. My thoughts. My
emotions. Enter with caution and an open mind." The power of the Web is obvious and undeniable.
We diminish it at our peril. But what if the most potent social
effect to spread outward from the Internet turns out to be disinhibition, the
breaking down of personal restraints and the endless elevation of oneself? It
may be already. Disinhibited vocabulary is now the normal way
people talk on cable TV, such as on "The Sopranos" or in stand-up
comedy. On the Web and on the street, more people than not talk like
this now. What once was isolated is covering everything. No wonder the major
non-cable networks are suing to overturn the FCC's decency rulings; they, too,
want the full benefits of normalized disinhibition. Hip-hop, currently our most
popular music form, is a well-defined world of disinhibition. Then there's politics. On the Huffington Post
yesterday, there were more than 600 "comments" on Karl Rove and the
White House staff shake-up. "Demoted my --- the snake is still in the
grass." "He should be demoted to Leavenworth." "Rove is Bush's
Brain, and without him, our Decider-in-Chief wouldn't know how to wipe his own
----." From a primary post on the same subject on the
Daily Kos, widely regarded as one of the most influential blogging sites in
Democratic politics now: "I don't give a ----. Karl Rove belongs in
shackles." "A group of village whores have taken a day off to do
laundry." Intense language like this used to be confined
to construction sites and corner bars. Now it is normal discourse on Web sites,
the most popular forums for political discussion. Much of this is new. Politics
is a social endeavor. The Web is nothing if not "social." But the
blogosphere is also the product not of people meeting, but venting alone at a
keyboard with all the uninhibited, bat-out-of-hell hyperbole of thinking,
suggestion and _expression_ that this new technology seems to release. At the risk of enabling, does the Internet mean
that all the rest of us are being made unwitting participants in the personal
and political life of, um, crazy people? As populist psychiatry, maybe this is
a good thing; the Web allows large numbers of people to contribute to others'
therapy. It takes a village. But researchers note that the isolation of Web
life results in many missed social cues. It is similar to the experience of
riding an indoor roller coaster, what is known in that industry as a "dark
ride." This dark ride could be a very long one. |
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