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April 05, 2003
what is it good for...
I was reading a post on Joi's blog about blogs and googlewashing and whatnot, and had a thought... The funny thing about blogs is their lack of historicity in the minds of so many people. Blogs are just the confluence of a bunch of odds and ends with about as much great earth shattering newness as, say, DOS or the html/www was. Sure, they turned the world on its collective head, not because it was doing something special, but because it wasn't. DOS was lobotomized Unix. Html lobotomized SGML. Blogs just plain lobotomized *. As with all killer apps like this, the deal is that they don't stretch anyone's paradigms, or challenge anyone's cosmologies, so they can become ubiquitous... be adopted by the treadmill of the pundits who make up the rolling wave of the A-lists, and in the end, not cause much change to the way things are at all. It doesn't mean that they're not useful, valuable or fun. Just that they're not much more than that. I am always suspicious of anyone who gets the notion into their head that they've come up with a solution to a problem. Not that I don't want to hang out with them, or be their friend, but unless you realize that solutions create problems, not solve them, I gotta wonder what you're smoking."
Posted by jason at April 5, 2003 06:33 PM