January 30, 2008
Still Cozy After All These Years?
Here's a question that I want to get out of the way early on: Do I still think that it's a little too cozy in the blogosphere? Hmm. I still read some of the same blogs I was trawling back in 2003, and I still find many of them annoying in one way or another. But--gross generalization here--they're not as plagued by narcissism as they were then. Or they've just segued into a more confident, less cronyistic, more essayistic sort of narcissism.
As people get more comfortable inhabiting a medium or a genre, they have less to prove, and less need to point out how cool it is that other people are doing the same thing. I make my living via old-school journalism, but I have found myself siding with the bloggers in some of the us-versus-them debates that certain members of the MSM (that's mainstream media to you, kimosabe) insist on having. I don't understand the MSM gatekeeper mentality any better than I understand some litbloggers' insistence that they do criticism better than any ink-stained wretch. It's case by case, people.
All the cool kids are microblogging now anyway.