The blog mob: “Written by fools to be read by imbeciles.”
This is a piece I decided to read because Chris Muir made fun of it in his cartoon. In this painful discourse on how journalists write better than bloggers, his piece had a grammatical error. A period was missing from the end of a sentence. I found the piece interesting for another reason. His sentence structure and choice of words had me gasping for air. Here is a sample.
Every conceivable belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion . . .
His over the top word selection had me reaching for my dictionary, too. Logorrheic is a great word for the crossword puzzle writers. Maybe the most interesting aspect of this article is that I think he was writing for a specific group, bloggers. Who else would spend the mental effort to find the humor and irony in this piece? His serious sounding rant about bloggers actually pokes fun at the self-importance expressed by both journalist and bloggers.
The demise of newspapers has been foretold for many years. Radio and television won the war for people’s minds a long time ago. Somehow newspapers adapt and survive. Bloggers are just another competitor to arrive on the scene. The publicizing of original news stories has become more democratic because of the internet. The internet has dramatically lowered the barriers and encouraged the amateur journalists. What we are seeing is the gradual dismantling of the information monopolies enjoyed by television, radio, and newspapers. In this environment the mob has a greater voice on what is a good story than they ever had in the traditional media. The craft of writing has always had a supporting role. Photographs, video, and the spoken word share this supporting role. A good story is still the king.