Informant38

Keeping a weblog of your reading on the Web forces you to commit to some opinion on each link, and publishing that opinion forces you to take full responsibility for it.

The widespread campaign to dismiss webloggers as narcissists is a clearcut demonstration of how the self-knowledge taboo is currently being enforced. Capitalism (in the broadest sense) has no use for original, authentic, self-discovering individuals, because they naturally opt out of the conformist consumer culture. So the profiteers of that culture actively propagandise against self-knowledge, encouraging instead self-distrust and self-hate. ("Ewwww, if you don't fit in with us, you're not hip!")

Because weblogging takes place in an infinite 'namespace'-- ie, nobody is squeezed out even if you take up gigabytes of space-- there's comparatively little territorial harrassment, as compared to traditional publication on paper... and proportionally greater opportunity for experimental risk-taking. (The harrassment you'll get will be limited to email, and will take them a lot more effort to send than it takes you to ignore it!)


{barger is the original template for this, for me. I read about robotwisdom in the ragmulch version of the New Yorker, back in '99. and followed through to blogger, eventually, some months later.
everything changes, everything evolves, and at the exponential rate of change of online things like blogging it isn't possible now for any living person to speak with any accuracy whatsoever concerning the nature of, nor the effectiveness of, what these journals are, and are doing. Dan Gillmor, floating wreckage, Barger's robotwisdom, Tom Tomorrow, Through The Looking Glass, Sam Smith's Progressive, which is essentially a blog, and many others I haven't seen yet, these are beacons, light in a time of darkness. the coast is rocky, the storm is worsening. it's true there are thousands of narcissistic and useless blogs, some of them from people who were involved in Internet evolution from the get, and there are many hundreds of vicious ranting blogs, but all that's necessary to subvert that is not reading them, not linking to them. to pretend that that's all there is, is like falling back on the patchouli oil/bell bottom cliched images editorial writers clung to when the 'hippy' phenomenon became too large, and too scary, to ignore. there was so much more happening then, some of it vital to the continuation of the human spirit, noble and liberating, and sincerely, deeply, compassionate.
key word that.}

{and I'll say again here, there's no adherence to any protocols, and certainly no attempt to plagiarize, I'm way too vain to plagiarize anybody, it's about the links, if you want to know who wrote the text, hit the link, my stuff is between the brackets {...thus...} or even {...so...}