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Is anything poignant written in blogs?
emnmnme
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Registered User regular
Can you take the best elements from all types of fast food and make something that tastes like a gourmet meal? Thinking that way, can you take the best blurbs out of blogs and message boards and edit them so that they say something meaningful?
Well, that's not exactly what I'm getting at. I don't mean stitching together a bunch of well-worded posts is going to give you something that rivals Byron or gives a Zen master something new to think about. But I do mean that if a million amateur debaters and armchair philosophers get together and contribute their two cents to a thread, chances are good something important or earth-shattering will be brought up, right?
Is that the nature of Web 2.0? That it's the new 'thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters' who will eventually hammer out something great? Or is Average Joe typing up mini-editorials every week just getting in the way of sophisticated thinking? I'd like to think there are timeless diamonds in the rough buried in the internet somewhere but who's got time to sift for them? ;-)
Well, that's not exactly what I'm getting at. I don't mean stitching together a bunch of well-worded posts is going to give you something that rivals Byron or gives a Zen master something new to think about. But I do mean that if a million amateur debaters and armchair philosophers get together and contribute their two cents to a thread, chances are good something important or earth-shattering will be brought up, right?
Is that the nature of Web 2.0? That it's the new 'thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters' who will eventually hammer out something great? Or is Average Joe typing up mini-editorials every week just getting in the way of sophisticated thinking? I'd like to think there are timeless diamonds in the rough buried in the internet somewhere but who's got time to sift for them? ;-)
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I wouldn't be surprised if it got turned into a tv show or a movie someday.
http://theworstofperth.com/ It's also turned into something of a forum for people to debate about whether x or y really is all that bad. Users are encouraged to post their own 'worst of's.
In terms of poignant, I guess someone writing about their own terminal disease until the day they passed away could be considered poignant. I found this via metafilter.com: http://brainhell.blogspot.com/ It's the blog of Brian Hill who died on February 2 from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. Comparing the posts at diagnosis to some of the final months is startling.
http://warhistorian.org/wordpress/
that's the blog of a professor i know here at Ohio State, and it's pretty good, i think. i don't always agree with what he says, but he's one of the most knowledgable military history profs i can think of
Quantity and quality are generally mutually exclusive. I can't think of an instance where enough of the former somehow leads to the latter.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
I suppose if you are a rich white person this would be funny. I know a lot of white people who like crystal meth and mixed martial arts and fucking hot girls. I didn't notice any of those things on the list.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
This kind of comes down to the central message of this year's academy award winner for best animated feature. Beyond this, the more you try, the more likely you are to get outliers.
In warfare, hero warfare hasn't been used since the Greeks, and most wars seem to be decided by how well each side can mobilize its forces, so equal mights can have different average power across battles.
This is a part of it. If I said there was a very thought provoking point written of the fourth page of some youtube comments, people would want to see it more for the contradiction than the message's contents. Something amazing? Written beneath a youtube video? *gasp*
The bigger part of this thread is discussing whether or not the everyman en masse can produce art with words. Really good art. I keep thinking back to the book Ender's Game where the two siblings on earth debate each other on a message board of some kind and eventually their debates are studied in schools across the planet. Locke and Demosthenes? Something like that.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
Are you suggesting we print the internet?
:P
Consumerist can be a good read.
It seems both obvious and bitter to me. They hit the mark occasionally but mostly it's kinda cringeworthy.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
I could see the concept working for an article or two, but making a whole blog about it works as well as a comedian who tries to make his whole routine about race.
Not fucking well.
its like where people send in hand made notes to some guy detailing their worst secrets. some pretty harrowing stuff there.
Her posts go into great detail on the night of the fire, the harrowing days that followed, the painful medical treatment she endured, the stories of her neighbours who died, were horrifically injured or were completely unharmed based on pure chance, what it was like to find out someone did it on purpose, what it was like to face that person in court and testify at the trial, how she felt when said bastard was sentenced to death, how she wound up giving talks to arson investigators around the country until PTSD took hold of her and left her barely able to function right up to now, where's she's somewhere approaching normal again.
It is, hands down, the most incredible, moving blog I've ever read. It's terrifying, heartbreaking and above all brutally honest.
This is a pretty extreme example, but I think it shows why some blogs are important. Extraordinary things happen to ordinary people. None of us know what tomorrow will bring. The best thing about blogs is that they can give voice to that. Whatever you're going through seems a whole lot easier when a quick Google reveals several million people going through exactly the same crap you are.
Yes, but both the kids are fucking geniuses.
So while the message may be missed, the message may still also exist and it may be poignant. It would be ludicrous to think that no blogger exists that isn't thoughtful and intelligent.
A message exists to be received, I would say, but it still also exists if it hasn't fulfilled its purpose. To communicate something is the purpose of a message but failure in its purpose does not erase its existence. So, to me, the question posited is similar to "if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it really make a sound?" The truth is, there is a deluge of bullshit on the internet which obfuscates quality material too often, but the quality stuff may still exist.
I can go write the best, most brilliant blog post right now, but if it doesn't reach people, it might as well not exist.
It's not analogous to the tree and forest thing because a tree doesn't fall to make itself heard. Whereas the purpose of writing a blog post, most of the time, is for readers to read it.
Saying "it might as well not exist" suggests that you agree that it exists even if you don't think it should, therefore you are agreeing with my point, which is only that poignancy exists in blogs. That you agree with me seems to conflict with your "I disagree" up there.
See, I never argued whether these poignant messages should or shouldn't exist within blogs. I am just pointing out that they do. I am answering the question asked in the thread topic, and the answer to that question is an undeniable yes. I think it's a silly question, to be honest. Or it's phrased in a daft way if that's not actually what Eminem means to ask.
It absolutely is analagous and the reason is very simple: the philosophical question about the tree falling is because "sound" is a property that relates to two things: making a sound and hearing a sound. The same quandry exists for the concept of "message" - it exists to communicate and is both said and heard (or written and read, the point being that the concept of a "message" usually implies that it is meant to be received). I am sure people would argue that an unheard message is no message at all. However I don't agree as bloggers are attempting to communicate. Whether people actually receive their message or not is inconsequential to the message existing because these people are not writing in private journals, they are writing in an attempt to communicate and that attempt is what defines their writings as messages...existent ones. Some of which are poignant.
I'd also like to point out that a message may be poignant whether one person or one million people read it. It's "poignancy" is entirely unrelated to the amount of people that read it. But I'm assuming that (hopefully) is obvious to those debating this.
Why are you lumping blogs together into the comparison of "ordinary people" and "geniuses"?
Are you suggesting that professionals and geniuses can't have blogs?
That seems a little silly.
My blogs of choice are generally written by fairly prominent journalists. A lot of the political blogs I read are written by various academics, many of whom have written books.
The Wisdom of Crowds
"The opening anecdote relates Francis Galton's surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged (the average was closer to the ox's true butchered weight than the estimates of most crowd members, and also closer than any of the separate estimates made by cattle experts)."
I don't know how that would apply to writing. If you take millions of blogs, add them together, then divide them to find an average, the program crashes because you can't perform mathematical operations on strings.
Cool blog. It appears fear of robots predates James Cameron.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
http://bp1.blogger.com/_sGYULzoQCgA/R8OcyMB8tHI/AAAAAAAABaA/_484O7oM-mA/s1600-h/2214587372_f2ac688e8e.jpg
(it won't let me post it as an image but you should check it out)
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
The most valid (although not sufficient, in my opinion) case to be made for traditional media, where dissemination carries a cost, is that there is a lot of good editorial review done there. They unfortunately have not realized yet that, while the economics of distribution are different, we still need professional editors to gather and review material on the internet. Publishers often speak gloom and doom for this sector if the traditional media cease to exist, yet we would still need them and they would be just as valued in the community on the internet as they were in the traditional media.
With the death of traditional publishers, the internet would get the influx of editorial professionals we need to establish the communities talked about in this article.
I think Loren brought that up. I read a lot of blogs by people who came to them via more mainstream media. In a lot of cases, the blogosphere makes available to all what would have been insider discussion ten years ago. Of course it also requires you to figure out who is full of shit and who isn't.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
That's why I like Google Knol.
Which just proves the point of more information being better. I'd never heard of this. Now I will haunt it like a ghost.
edit: someone send me an invite...please...
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
That would certainly make the most sense given some idealized notions of media, but given the crap that has existed since "media" has been around, I think it's a little more complex and a bit less meritocratic.
There are publishers pushing crap and there are publishers pushing good stuff. I just wish the editors who know how to find and bring out the good stuff were not confined to the traditional media.
If people would know they could get recognized, acknowledged and paid just as well by self-publishing through the internet as through traditional media, the last edge of traditional media over the internet would lie in pieces.
We need experts and editors to organize our information. While judging a piece yourself on your own is fine and dandy for regular entertainment, we can't risk that for more serious stuff. Expert panels can serve as investment brokers that mitigate the risks of investing on the internet.