And Tenement Halls

It’s funny the way mass-media has grown to perceive the blogging community. In light of Dan Rather’s Bush-bashing blunder, commentators on various news broadcasts have begun to paint a noble image of what bloggers represent. We are the new wave of grass roots political activism. We are all highly literate, immaculately well-informed scholars who can sway the masses with our incisive commentary. We are vigilant patriots, forever standing at the ready with pens poised, waiting for the next political controversy to arise so that we can issue to the world our immediate opinions.

When the Bush memo scandal was at its peak two weeks ago, right-wing talk show host Sean Hannity praised bloggers for debunking the memo’s authenticity long before Dan Rather and CBS admitted their mistake. On the left side of the spectrum, Jon Stewart, host of the The Daily Show, recently spoke some of his own words of admiration for bloggers on The Charlie Rose Show:

Here are people that are unbelievably knowledgeable in very specific fields, and unbelievably well-tentacled into all sorts of areas of information–and they’re doing it immediately.

There are others in the media that have had similar praises.

You know, I used to think bloggers were the only ones who took blogging too seriously. I agree, there does exist a faction of ridiculously smart people that maintains informative and potentially influential blogs. But even in this text-based virtual world of ours, the laws of economics still apply. What we have here is market saturation. With the growing popularity of weblogs, coupled with the increasing credibility that the mass media deems on the so-called “blogosphere,” the blogging community has seen a huge influx of new entrants. Let’s be honest. For every politically-charged weblog, there are twelve others that are simply devoted to pictures of the webmasters’ cats. There are more people talking about the mundane minutia of their daily experiences than there are people discussing France’s ban on religious apparel in its schools. More people are bitching about their failing love lives as opposed to George W. Bush’s fiscal policies. On the whole, we’re not quite the noble savages that the media plays us up to be.

It’s not my place to belittle the blogging community, nor is it my intention to do so. I don’t talk about politics very much at all, but I do often blog about mundane things. I do bitch a lot about my love life (but not recently, thanks to Diana). And I don’t have a cat, but I do take pictures of my stuffed bear and post them online. I’m not trying to discredit the world of blogging, but I also don’t think we should be deifying it with hype. The blog can impart wisdom, yes. But given the staggering amount of blogs out there, who has time to read them all? The market is saturated, and just as it is with cable television and its prolific channel selection, nobody has time to read and care about every blog. In short, do bloggers really have as much power as figures in the mass media would claim?

The internet is a huge bathroom wall, and everybody has a chance to scrawl on it. In leaving their mark, some would choose profundity with a quotation from Gandhi, while others are perfectly content to scribble things like, “I heart boobs.” When you indiscriminately open up a writing medium to a mass selection of people, you have to expect anything. I don’t deny the power of single voices. But how often do you take heed to the things that people write on bathroom walls?

The other day, my classmate Jennifer saw somebody walk by wearing a Blogspot t-shirt, and she asked me, “What the hell is a blog?” Damn straight, Jennifer.