From the WSJ:
“I don’t think the blogosphere is breeding cannibals. But it looks to me as if the world of blogs may be filling up with people who for the previous 200 millennia of human existence kept their weird thoughts more or less to themselves. Now, they don’t have to. They’ve got the Web. Now they can share.”
The irony of course is that he is sharing his weird opinion in the a place called OpinionJournal.com. Somehow people having discussions scares this Henninger. He thinks we should all keep our mouths shut and let them spoon feed us our opinions. If we have such weird thoughts that don’t mean anything then why be concerned about it at all? Don’t like it? Don’t read it. Stop complaining that we aren’t joined lockstep with you.
“But the blogosphere is also the product not of people meeting, but venting alone at a keyboard with all the uninhibited, bat-out-of-hell hyperbole of thinking, suggestion and expression that this new technology seems to release.”
His erroneous dismissal of the blogosphere hinges on the premise that no one reads blogs…after quoting the popular Huffington Post and Daily Kos. He doesn’t mention any right wing blogs but I wouldn’t be surprised if he is a big RedState or Powerline fan – you know those heroes that uncovered the Dan Rather typo. According to him only the liberal blogs are impudent and out of line. Putting his disdain for ordinary people writing aside, he fails to note that the some of the most popular liberal bloggers are lawyers and professionals.
“The Web site currently famous for enabling and aggregating millions of personal blogs is called MySpace.com. If you opened its “blogs” page this week, the first thing you saw was a blogger’s video of a guy swilling beer and sticking his middle finger through a car window…In our time, it has generally been thought bad and unhealthy to “repress” inhibitions. Spend a few days inside the new world of personal blogs, however, and one might want to revisit the repression issue.”
You mean like Cheney’s lack of decorum? Or maybe Bush’s? Or other shining moments that didn’t happen on the internet:
