100% Content Free!
As the politcal news calms down, I veer sharply back into the "Blogs: What's Up With That?" general theme I have yet to exhaust. At least not from my perspective. Whether you, Dear Reader, have grown tired of it frankly isn't that interesting to me.

OK, that was a little harsh. I'm sorry. It's just that it's hard to think of something new to write every single day, especially when I a) don't go anywhere and b) don't do anything. I still don't want to write a bunch of stuff about my kids mostly because if I were to suddenly die, I wouldn't want to leave this as a record and give them the mistaken impression that I actually like them.

See, that's why I haven't told my wife about this yet. She wouldn't have thought that line was funny at all. ("Ha ha, she's not the only one, Pops." Don't think I can't hear you.)

In any event, I've seen lots and lots of blogs that simply have nothing to say. I don't mean that in a critic's judgmental way, I mean that quite literally they have nothing to say.

There are three different forms the content-less blog takes, usually alternating within the same blog as to stretch out the period of posting until the well runs dry and their Blogger account goes quiet.

First and most common is the Song Lyrics post. The best ones will simply use a snippet or two to emphasize a point or a feeling. By and large, however, bloggers will post entire songs word for word (even the repetitive choruses) without comment or introduction. End of post. I guess we're supposed to figure out what this means for ourselves and we should probably thank the poster for sharing the wisdom of Slipknot or Ashlee Simpson with us. And look, I know not everyone's a writer or a poet. Given the number of people who currently write personal blogs, the odds that all... most... many of them would also be gifted writers are pretty slim, simply in terms of volume. So the song lyrics help them express something they feel they can't otherwise express. Fine. But I reserve the right to make fun of you if your heart and soul can be laid out in an Evanescence song.

The second and third are sort of related. The second is the Pre-Fab Personality Questionnaire posting, where the blogger posts a list of yes-no questions (superficially personal) with an X next to the ones that apply to them.

Have you ever...
(X)Kissed someone of the opposite sex?
( )Kissed someone of the same sex?
(X)Shoplifted?
( )Colored your hair?
( )Colored someone else's hair?
(X)Set fire to another human being?

This is usually followed by some coy protestations about not kissing and telling that leaves the details unexplored, which is fine. But seriously, don't you want to hear the Set A Person On Fire story?

I'd tell it, but I'm not allowed to under the terms of my plea agreement.

Third and last skips the details and simply links the reader to the result of some personality test the blogger took on some other page without any explanatory context or hint of motivation. We don't even get to see the questions, let alone the answers. All we get to know is what arbitrary "type" they fit in to. Oh, and usually the very nice cheese-ball graphic the test-givers knocked out to correspond.

If I were a type of music I'd be: Grunge!
If I were a dictator I'd be: Josef Stalin!
If I were a type of cheese I'd be: Camembert!

Ironically, just like the Pre-Fab List, the personality evaluation posts actually tell us the least about the poster. At least they have to choose the song lyrics themselves.

And now as an exercise in arrogance, rhetoric and self-indulgence, I will now employ both sides of the same metaphor to describe this phenomenon. Modern America in the Atkins Diet era will be the premise. Watch.

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One: It's blogging for the Atkins age: less, less, less. As we as a nation cut out essential parts of our diets in order to chase the superficial dream of thin-ness without reference to the general health of our bodies, bloggers cut out the starchy substance of themselves and leave in its place postings that exist without reference to themselves, their true selves in any recognizable way. In the end this technique eases the most basic hunger without any sense of satisfaction of fulfillment. The reckless, carbohydrate energy of self-understanding is sacrificed to the cause of narrowly-defined self-protection, meeting the absolute minimal requirement for survival in a social world.

Two: It's blogging as a Atkins backlash: all bread, all sugar, no meat. Blogging is a way for these people to fill up, to binge on the doughy, sticky, frosted pastry of self-indulgence without bothering to think about caring for the rest of their being. It's fast food for the mind and soul; those who indulge bloat their blogs with empty calories that, in the end, will provide them nothing past the momentary rush of a carbohydrate high as readers compare their own results and/or song lyrics, but have nothing else to say, no other meaty engagement beyond that. They lack the discipline, the attention, the necessary drive to consider the way they appear to others at the expense of a momentary fix of adrenalizing attention.

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Wow. I haven't spun lines of bullshit like that since grad school. It's good to know I haven't lost it entirely.

And in closing, I leave you with a quote from one of my favorite bands, geek-rock heroes They Might Be Giants from a song called "I've Got A Fang". It goes like this:

I've got a fang.
I've got... a fang.
I've got a fang.

Think about it.


This post on the Narcissus Scale: 8.0


Pops


- posted by Pops @ 1:47 PM