|
2008-05-26, 9:44 a.m.:
One of my favorite new expressions is "losing the will to blog." I've seen it in several blogs lately and of course in Emily Gould's big emotional expo in the NYT Magazine yesterday. I read through a lot of the comments about Emily's essay (though not all, there being over 1,000 of them just on the NYT site), at least 75% of them negative, and it occurred to me that the whole world of blogging and even the Internet is simply not as mainstream as I thought. People equating using computers, being on the computer, "living" on the computer with not having a life, with not living life. Not that I am advocating a 24/7 dealio on the Internet. But I do still bristle at the presumption that writing is not living, is not worthwhile, that writing that smacks of the human condition pure and simple (as opposed to reportage from the front lines of Iraq ) is trash and bunk. There is a great deal of vitriol being spewed to the effect that Emily should go watch a sunset and/or enter a warzone and stop being so damned narcissistic. Well, she's only 26 or 27. Someday she will. In the meantime she's honed her writing skills nicely, had her big "New York experience," muddled and muddled through being a minor personality and/or cause celebre, and Said Goodbye to All That ... She has plenty of time to do that world-ameliorating reportage or write the Gr. Am. Novel. She probably will. She's ambitious and she's obviously graphomaniacal. It's a good combination, if you give it a little bit of time. I don't get the hatred reserved for this young blogger. I'm thinking that the majority of online NYT readers are simply not as web savvy as I assumed. This brand of blogging is nothing special (I'm not really talking about Gawker here, but about Emily's personal blogs, Heartbreak Soup and Emily Magazine). Love and heartbreak and high drama and cholera and all that are what one DOES when one is twentysomething ... has everyone forgotten that already? And I thought I was the �ber-curmudgeon.
1 comments
< before this * after this >
|
