The View From Half Way Down The Cliff
I think it's easy sometimes, when you're inside a particular community, to misread the extent to which people outside that community care or even know about what it is you're doing. Some communities are so insular and self-gratifying that it doesn't matter. The hardcore convention-going Klingon-speaking Star Trek dork could give a shit what I or anyone else thinks so long as he got his twenty-seventh signed picture of Leonard Nimoy. Lots of self-gratifying going on in that little community, I imagine (although I do not imagine it in any vivid or graphic detail, no).

Blogs and bloggers are in sort of a weird position at the moment. We all recognize ourselves and each other. Almost everytime I walk past a mirror I'll go "Hey, that's me!" in under three guesses. But where do we fit amongst the non-blogging dirty masses really?

We've got some media heat coming off an election year. Bloggers were even featured as commentators on television (and frankly if we were suited for TV, would be we hiding in our basements like moles plonking out this stuff?) during the election itself. Now there are all kinds of magazine articles and university symposia about bloggers and their influence on... well, anything and everything really.

With the inauguration now come and gone, the political cycle is now officially over. I suspect we're about to find ourselves floundering as a community for a while. The hardcore lefty blogs will still say Bush sucks every day while the hardcore righty blogs will find new and colorful ways to complain about gay people and Jews... er sorry, the "New York media elite". Man, the Right has all the best euphemisms.

But then there are the rest of us; the ones who dabbled in politics but aren't consumed entirely by it. Unlike the Trekkies, we are a mass media outlet. Let's face it, we all want people to look at this stuff otherwise we'd just write it down in our Hello Kitty! diaries like we used to.

Journals. I mean journals. Black leather journals. All entries about football and naked chicks. Yeah.

No, we don't keep these thoughts hidden between the mattress and the box spring alongside a 10-year old Playboy magazine we found in a dumpster and a condom we hope to one day use as something other than a water balloon. We want people to read them, which means the loop cannot be closed in the way it can be for Trekkies or knitters or cat fanciers.

The potential for new people to both start blogs and to read them is, I think, about to take a precipitous (although probably temporary) drop as our Old Media profile fades like John Kerry in late October.

What we need is some concrete real-world legitimacy. We need something to both fill the content-void created by the end of the election and to put blogs and bloggers firmly, indelibly into the minds of people who would otherwise have no use for either.

What we need is a good scandal. Sex and blood, one or the other. Preferably both, but one will do.

Remember back when the internet was first entering mainstream consciousness? A few tech weirdos would make plane reservations on Prodigy on something, but that was about it. Tom Brokaw would direct people to the NBC News website at the end of a broadcast, but you could hear his eyes rolling behind the all-covering infographic.

Quick think, what was the first national news story you heard involving the internet?

Me, it was creepy old pedophiles luring young girls or boys away from the homes using chatrooms, sending them plane tickets (the really tacky pedophiles would send me... er, them bus tickets) once their confidence was won. Every news anchor had to explain what a "chat room" was, what an "internet" was, complete with scintillating video of people typing on keyboards.

A profile-raiser if ever there was one. Not only did general knowledge of the internet rise in part because of stories like this, but I'm sure actual use and participation was affected as well. Just think of it: every pervy nonce with a credit card probably went out the next day and bought themselves and 14.4 modem.

[Aside: Used to be in order to become a child-molester was a lot more difficult. You would have to become a child singing star with your brothers, endure several disfiguring plastic surgeries in order to make yourself look like a kindly old woman, make a zillion dollars, buy a Ferris wheel and a monkey, all just to get strangers to leave you alone with their kids. Technology. Man.]

There's nothing like shock and horror to leave an impression on people. Why do you think all local news promos during sweeps months say things like: "Something in your home right now can kill you. Want to know what it is? Tune it at 11!" They know.

We as bloggers need something like that. I think I have it figured out too: someone will have to be murdered by a blog-stalker.

Maybe it's already happened, but obviously the details weren't grisly or that-could-happen-to-me! creepy enough to draw national attention because I didn't hear about it.

Here's the hard part: we need a volunteer. Actually we need two, one for the murderer and one for the blogger-victim. Don't say no right away. Think about it just a little: you could be the Great Martyr of Blogdom. Blogs all over the world would dedicate post after post to your memory, your sacrifice. At least until Brad Pitt starts dating someone else, then we'll be all over that, but you'll get your moment.

Or if you wanted to go the other way, you could be the biggest media villain since OJ! Well, maybe not OJ. But certainly as famous as that guy who killed that chick he was stalking. Oh, what was his name... ah well. Who am I kidding? The victim is the glory role in this grisly play. The only thing I can offer you, potential murderers, is the chance finally to satiate that bloodlust you've been nursing all these years, the chance to scratch the unscratchable itch in the unreachable center of your diseased brain.

I would offer myself as one or the other, but I'm sure you all know by now that I don't actually exist. "Pops" is actually an artificial intelligence program, forgotten and left running on a dusty old Commodore 64 in a basement at CalTech. Simple algorithms spit out random strings of text that are then parsed for syntax and punctuation, then spewed across the internet for everyone to see. I am the digital equivalent of 10,000 monkeys with typewriters.

That doesn't mean I'm not serious about the rest of it though. Consider.


This post on the Narcissus Scale: 3.9


Pops

- posted by Pops @ 9:46 AM