December 10, 2001
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:NPR's Geoff Nunberg is blah on Blogs - "bumbling, self-important and dutiful"
I heard the teaser for this segment of today's Fresh Air as I drove home "Geoff Nunberg on the internet phenomenon of 'blogs." I made sure to tune in. Would he discover the thicket of political commentary? Would he notice that while bloggers don't agree on everything, they seem to be politically libertarian as a group? Would he comment on the diversity of webdesign? The novel ability of this community to fact check and cross reference easily?
No. He compared the blogging world to Punch's "Diary of a Nobody", and desribes the "Nobody" diarist Pooter with the choice adjectives above. He cites only one blog specifically, one in which a woman describes a date with her boyfriend and a trip to the store or some such nonsense. He calls this (rightly) a "density of humdrum detail."
According to Nunberg, the only things bloggers have in common is a lot of time on our hands (hah! if you want something done, give it to a busy person) and a tendency towards exhibitionism.
Nunberg's a linguist at Parc/Xerox. I've seen their IP cross my site a few times. Jeff, you there? I think you missed something...but it's just as well. We would have lapsed into self-referential baloney for days instead of the intelligent commentary available from my new favorite links "jump-menu" above (sorry Netscape <4 users!).
Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at December 10, 2001 08:34 PM | Technorati inbound links