Overblown Fears
Perez Hilton, New York City 2009
There’s been a lot of fear about blogs this past decade. Even the word “blog” is scary, like some gelatinous swamp thing oozing over our precious discourse, upending the neat order of things and leaving behind a trail of slime. These monsters were multiplying by the thousands, threatening to consume national media, bring Congress to its knees and subvert the interests of decent, regular people. As it turns out, “bloggers” were just regular people themselves, albeit with the time and energy to put their thoughts into writing on topics that inspired, enraged, and amused them. The difference was, those regular people had computers and the Internet, so suddenly the barriers to entry disappeared. Which means that the folks who used to shout at the TV now shout into your RSS feed. Some of them are even good at it. That’s the dirty little secret of punditry: anyone can do it. All it takes is a brain and a half-decent argument. (Ethics, fact-checking, accuracy -- that’s for journalists! Who, by the way, were blogging too.) Blogging was happening collectively -- hyperlinking individuals in a chain that blew up stories and pulled down titans (see: Dan Rather, Trent Lott). And it was all happening at warp speed. Did it make us leaner, faster, hungrier? Yes. Sloppier, snarkier? There was some of that too. But over all, the rise of blogging combined info-sharing and individual expression with a dash of humor that, on balance, has made us....better.
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