New contributor Richard Riccelli has already figured out the true secret to weblogging: Get somebody else to do it. Watch as he gets me to cite this smug essay by Michael Kinsley in Slate Magazine:
Poor Joe! Had the World Wide Web driven him crazy?
If so, we are all crazy now. There is something about the Web that brings out the ego monster in everybody. It’s not just the well-established tendency to be nasty. When you write for the Web, you open yourself up to breathtakingly vicious vitriol. People wish things on your mother, simply for bearing you, that you wouldn’t wish on Hitler.
But even in their quieter modes, denizens of the Web seem to lug around huge egos and deeply questionable assumptions about how interesting they and their lives might be to others.
This is strange. Anonymity, for better or for worse, is supposed to be one of the signature qualities of the Web. As that dog in The New Yorker cartoon famously says, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The Internet is a place where you can interact with other people and have complete control over how much they know about you. Or supposedly that is the case, and virtually everybody on the Internet is committed to achieving that goal.
But anonymity does not actually seem to interest many of the Web’s most devoted users. They are the ones who start their own sites, or sign up for MySpace, or submit videos to YouTube. Quite the opposite: The most successful Web sites seem to be those where people can abandon anonymity and use the Internet to stake their claims as unique individuals. Here is a list of my friends. Here are all the CDs in my collection. Here is a picture of my dog. On the Internet, not only does everybody know that you’re a dog. Everybody knows what kind of dog, how old, your taste in collars, your favorite dog food recipe, and so on.
Here’s my take: Kinsey’s insufferable vanity is sneering at the insufferable vanities of others. In the end, he is doing what they are doing, but once removed. If theirs is a pointless romance with their own egos, his is a pointless romance with an Inflatable Joy Doll of an ego. In denigrating them, he diminishes himself. That last sentence is this sorry excuse for a man’s unabridged biography…
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Joe The Consumer says:
I think he’s right on. He’s laughing at the idiots who post videos of themselves crashing on their skateboards, and making idiots of themselves in one way or another. I don’t see him dimishing himself. Apparently, he struck a nerve with you Gregg.
November 27, 2006 — 10:40 pm
Brian Brady says:
Good observation about the reverse ego boost. Kind of like the chess player in high school who loathes jocks but secretly fancies himself as the hero who gets the girl.
Let’s face it..web 2.0 is in the revolutionary stahe. As you pointed out in an earlier blog, it is confined to the obscure enthusiasts in our industries.
I sincerely hope that Kinsey targets me as the poster boy for ego gratification…so someone reads my blog
November 27, 2006 — 10:41 pm
Pat Kitano says:
Self publicity just exploded onto the scene starting with, let’s put a relative time zero to this, those TV reality shows started a decade ago. The mass acceptance of this kind of exposure is just a societal sea change. I would never post my picture online or even start a blog two years ago… it was beyond my comfort level.
November 27, 2006 — 11:21 pm