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Sunday, March 13, 2005

The Sunday Times appears committed to discrediting blogs

The Times/News International/News Corporation Limited shows no sign of appreciating the various potential of blogs as they are now being put to use across the internet. But seems content to make a mockery of the blogosphere and its participants. It makes you wonder why these journalists don't just turn off the internet and go and do something less boring instead. Sitting at their desks, writing misleading and uninformed articles bemoaning the efforts of what they imagine to be a unified tribe of "bloggers," is really of so little use to anyone that its hard to imagine why they bother. Cue the usual negative stereotypes and run VT.

The inner world of Joe Blogs: "Everything you never wanted to know about your fellow citizens’ banal daily lives is accessible to you now on the internet,"Allan Brown, The Sunday Times, March 13, 2005

“The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything,” wrote Oscar Wilde in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, “except what is worth knowing.”
Few things bear this out more convincingly than the world of blogging (or, as it winsomely styles itself, the blogosphere). While older readers adjust their ear trumpets, it is perhaps worth pointing out that blogging is the increasingly popular pastime of placing one’s daily diary on the internet, the term blog being a contraction of “web log”.
"Unconstrained by the need to be interesting in any way whatsoever, blogs are the background radiation of the intellectual realm, the white noise of the collective unconscious, scrolling out their narratives whether anybody wishes to read them or not."
"In one sense a Warholian tribute to the fascination of banality, blogs confirm Martin Amis’s claim that where once it was thought that everyone had a book in them, that book has now become an autobiography."
"As astonishing as it is to think that computer geeks might shy from human contact, bloggers, it seems, can be a furtive and elusive bunch, preferring the one-way mirror of their controlled solitude to the messy complexities of real people."
"As with the Google search engine, simplistic page designs are considered to be almost a badge of honour to bloggers: most just feature text, rolling and rambling down the page without interruption from such crowd-pleasing features as pictures. The medium is the message — and both can seem exquisitely dull."
"A one-man Central Office of Information, (Martin) Frost has clearly devoted his life to blogging, with results that make you wonder nervously what he might have done had the internet never been invented."
"The rest, on the other hand, simply make you ponder the processes that denied the bloggers the quotient of recognition and acknowledgment that prevent normal people’s diaries from escaping their desk drawers. "
"Blogs are electronic megaphones, and they turn what was once personal and anecdotal into tiny stitches in the vast tapestry of common knowledge. Virtually none of it is of any use to a reader. But read enough of them, and you suspect that the end-user is the last thing blogging is about."

Update (24th March):
- A good round-up of the responses to Allan Brown's article can be found here:
Sunday Times Scotland doesnae like bloggers, Independence :A personal blog for Scottish independence, by Stuart Dickson. 13 March, 2005
"Allan Brown, the dead-tree journalist assigned by Sunday Times Scotland's Ecosse supplement to scribble a story about Scottish blogging, does not like what he finds. We should not be too surprised. Bloggers, and especially political bloggers, are going to seriously challenge the hegemony of dead-wood newspapers in the foreseeable future....Lordy. And some journalists wonder why they are widely considered to be the rejected spermatozoa of Satan.Bye bye Sunday Times Scotland. When dead-tree media do finally choke on their own expulsions I will not be greetin at the burial."

Posted by Nick @ 08:30 GMT

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