Okay. I am sick and tired of reading in the newspapers that the “empowered bloggers” are actually helping to shift the political paradigm.
What a load of shit.
The closest that political bloggers came to having any influence on politics, so far, was the hideously failed bid of Howard Dean to become president. Oh, wow. That’s amazing. And all Dean did was use the bloggers for support — it’s not like they got him to where he was.
But the media still seems to be permanently masturbating over the idea of a populist blogger movement. It ain’t gonna happen. 99% of political bloggers simply bash the other side over and over again without any real agenda. Hell, I used to do that, with some legitimacy, back when I was Journal X’s resident “Rock and Roll Conservative”. Wired even wrote me up in a sentence or something. But it’s just spouting nonsense, on both sides.
The point is, nobody really reads the political blogs. They read blogs that are funny, they read blogs of big projects, and they read blogs that give them useful information. So, most of my blog is just devoted to navel-contemplating and sometimes to giving out information I think is useful — like how to remove a piece of spyware or something.
Frankly, I can’t stand most blogs. The only reason I write one myself is because it’s sooo much frigging easier than actually building a site, even if I use Dreamweaver. And I used to build and critique sites for a living. The majority of blogs out there are not just boring, like mine is, but actively annoying. Sixteen year olds vomiting great chunks of angst onto their keyboards, is what a lot of the blogosphere is. And just age those 16 year olds a bit and turn them into wannabe political pundits and it’s the same damn thing — vomiting political angst onto their keyboards, this time.
There are blogs that are useful, there are blogs that are entertaining. All I’m saying is that the great and glorious “Blog Movement” that the media thinks exists is just a bunch of smoke they blow up their own asses because they want to believe the entire computer world is dominated by animated liberals.
Give me a break. Blogs are useful for some things, as I’ve said. Ultimately they’re useful to the blogger him or herself as a venue for writing or providing information. But blogs are not harbingers of glorious revolution. Saying that over and over on TV should be a crime punishable by flogging.