Week of March 22, 2009 - March 28, 2009
March 25, 2009, 8:09PM
- So much space, so little substance in the blogosphere these days.
- A sampling from March 25, 2009:
- AP bureau chief Ron Fournier is concerned about Obama's teleprompter crutch. Chinese gerbils are on the pill. Banking crisis: should we call them toxic assets, troubled assets, fraudulent assets or legacy assets? Did you know Natasha Richardson's organ's were donated? Obama's a socialist, a communist and a fascist. Senator Judd Gregg said something really dumb. Vice President Joe Biden said something really dumb. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said something really dumb. AIG. AIG. AIG. AIG. AIG. Insurance giant AIG changes name to AIU. Journalism is dying. No it isn't! Yes it is! Obama's doing too little. Obama's doing too much. Vibrator-gate-starring Barbara Walters, Mika Brzezinski and Elisabeth Hasselback. ABC's White House correspondent Jake Tapper likes to Twitter. NBC's White House correspondent Chuck Todd asks Obama dumb question. House Republican Eric Cantor went to see Britney Spears concert. Researchers create fluorescent pigs.
- These are all actual topics that I plucked fresh from the web, webisphere, blogosphere, news-osphere, whatever. Sorry if I left some out. There were thousands to choose from, each as equally uninspiring, half-witted and irrelevant as the next, but I was getting weary and slightly delirious so I had to cull it down to a smattering.
- Now don't get me wrong.
- The last thing I want to be subjected to is linear seriousness across the board. There are some great thinkers out there doing some great blogging and reporting and I welcome the wonderfully diverse approaches--honest, in-depth, short, sarcastic, insightful, fun, revealing, poetic, satirical, silly-the common denominator, I believe, is thoughtfulness.
- However, those now exist in an ever expanding cluttersphere of political gossip, mindless chatter and peripheral snippets and snarks, chronicled and quantified and posing not at all cleverly as news in the important dress of the written word.
Behold the 24 hour news cycle--a mad rush to write, blog, micro-blog, comment and twitter everything, oblivious to the consequence of communicating nothing.
One little snipe--a sound byte that conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh burps up after chugging a can of oil, for example, can ripple infinitely across the internet in the space of a nanosecond and become the one thing everyone with a broadband connection, including kids, parents, politicians, reporters, twitterers, economists, novelists and sociologists will collectively inhale and obsess on for days on end, or daze on end as it were and yes this is a run-on sentence but it's too late to remedy now cause I'm tripped out on helium.
- Come yah, belly up to the meta-bong, mon.
- Experience the webisphere at its most combustible and brainless.
- A word of caution; it is dangerous.
- (Oh, shit. That rhymes, doesn't it? Bad writing. Fuck it. I can't breathe in here. Later. I've got to get some oxygen.)
