The View From Kalamazoo

I had a few thoughts on the Leader article. I had originally posted the link last week, but have only had time to re-read it and comment now:

First: all written communication is contrived and the forms of written communication carry with them built-in cultural assumptions and limitations. I think this goes without saying.

Second: the fascism of the format? Consider that, ignoring the issue of paper v. electronics, a newspaper is really just a heavily-structured group blog. Does news happen on a 24 hour publishing cycle? Or history — how absurd and fascist to try to fit the events of human history into a few hundred or thousand pages. I agree that it would be “more than a little unreasonable to declare a mode of communication fascist just because of the mode’s popularity”, however this doesn’t seem to be slowing Leader down any.

Third: I also find it interesting that Leader misses the most obvious delimiter for blogs – it isn’t sex or race but age. It isn’t difficult to run across a lot of blogs by blacks, Asians, whites, transvestites…but I, for one, rarely run across a blog maintained by someone over 50. Blogging is disproportionately a youth movement. Even the non-Western world is more represented than the AARP set – you can find plenty of Iraqi, Indian, Iranian, etc. blogs. (the only continent not well represented is Africa, but due to its extreme poverty it’s not merely blogging that is under-represented). Come to think of it, why is he trying to shoehorn human experience into the rationalist fascist media of formal publications, which inherently empower white males and enforces passive rather than active engagement with the world. Besides, are there even really such things as “publications”? The word originated in the late 14th century to signify making something “public” but what exactly is this “public” but an artificial construct that excluded women and ethnic minorities behind its facade of an all-encompassing rational human community.

It’s a pea and shell game.

Leader complains that blogs turn the internet into the equivalent of a high school popularity contest with the whining edge to his prose that one might expect from the second-runner-up for class president. Many, if not most, of the blogs I read bare little resemblance to the grasping and greedy bastions of solipsism he luridly describes. And very f-ing frankly, his characterization of female bloggers, feminine forms of communication, and insulting and assumptive. “Those people who are less able to exploit the new (and almost-mandatory) format for electronic communication”? Women! I’m surprised he doesn’t quote the President of Harvard University when yipping about gender in ways that echo Summers’ “innate differences”. Barbie once said “Math is hard!” Leader has her saying “Blogging is hard!” Mattel corrected their transgression, will Leader?

(Be the hit of your next party or gathering! Every time Leader uses the word ‘patriarchy’, drink!!)