I haven't blogged in two months!

It dawned on me recently that two months have gone by with nary an entry on this illustrious blog, and yet somehow the world keeps turning. I’ve been reading a lot lately about Internet 2.0 and new media paradigms and boundaries being shattered by the digital something or other, and every time I read something like this, I’m reminded that I, too, am a part of this 21st century digital revolution. We’re supposedly challenging all sorts of conventions and creating new communities with our MySpace pages and blogs and our buddy lists and our podcasts and our externets. Okay, I made the last one up, but my point is that we’re all involved in countless digital, virtual activities that are ostensibly revolutionizing the way people live. But to me, a revolution implies some kind of positive change. Instead, though, this digital communication revolution offers only illusions. The illusion of participation, the illusion of connection, and even the illusion of life.

Sure, we’ve all read about the Arctic Monkeys parlaying their Internet popularity into real world success. We’ve all read about wily adolescents capturing (okay, not literally “capturing”) pedophiles on MySpace. And certainly, there are blogs that have gained wide readership, and have had some sort of impact on the real world. There’s your Daily Kos, your… well, I know there are others. Additionally, there are countless blogs that, while not relevant to many, have a certain degree of stature within the blogsphere. But every blog success story is contextualized like this, differentiating the “real world” from the supposed home of the revolution, the “digital world.” True Internet success stories involve people who have been able to use their digital representations to earn a place in the real world, be it through a record contract, book deal, TV appearance, legitimate journalism gig, etc. Sure, the Sports Guy had a successful blog. How do we know this? Because now he writes for a magazine. Printed on paper. Sold in stores. We’re told that the Internet portends the death of print media, and maybe one day it will, but for now it seems like more of a distraction than a revolution.

Whenever I read about how wired my generation is, I feel a little tinge of guilt that I have been negligent in my generational duties: I haven’t blogged in forever; my last.fm profile is stagnant; my bookmarks need cleaning; I still don’t even have a MySpace page and have never listened to a podcast. What was once touted as a revolution seems more and more like a task list of ever-increasing inanity; more annoying, trivial stuff to do. Forgive me if I hear my friends squabble over who’s ranked in what order on their MySpace friend lists and don’t imagine a pandemic of NY Times subscription cancellations. More and more, we fill our lives with trivial obligations under the guise of progress. We laud all these new forms of communication that bring us closer together as if, prior to the Internet, humans rarely encountered one another. One day, will our children ask us how their grandparents met, since MySpace hadn’t been invented yet? Are we just supplanting actual, physical interaction with digital, virtual interaction, the measure of one’s connectedness being proportional to the degree of solitude he can achieve while still maintaining these connections?

Instead of interaction, we get the illusion of interaction. And with our broadband-enabled online photo albums, streaming audio and video, this illusion is getting better and better. Instead of participation in the media, we have the illusion of participation. We all write our blogs, but nobody reads them. (Except this one. Eighth most popular bog on the Net, this one is. Look it up.) It’s not that all this new technology enables us necessarily to do anything, it just enables us to think that we could, maybe, someday. Everyone is a film-making, rock-and-rolling, photographing, poetry-writing journalist. Or we would be. We will be. Someday. For now, though, we’re just a bunch of people who would go out tonight, but first we’ve got to update our blogs, write some Amazon product reviews and upload our latest batch of pictures to Flickr. So if we don’t make it out of the house, well, we’ll see you on MySpace!


[Editor’s note: I’m not exactly sure what brought on this Unabomber-esque rant; probably it’s just shame that some of my once-lapsed blogging friends have started writing again. Being a blogger might make you a loser, but there’s nothing more losery than trying to be a blogger and failing. Also, “losery” is not a word. But anyway, at least this blog will from now on, if nothing else, be hypocritical. So I’ve achieved that.]