Links
Archives
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
|
Blogoscopy: Woe Be Unto The Solipsists The blogosphere has provoked quite a lot of what UD calls particularity panic among established print writers who don't like to share the limelight. First there was Robert Samuelson ridiculing, in the Washington Post, the egotism of web writers who actually have a great deal less egotism than he. Now there's Michael Kinsley, also in the Post, saying exactly -- but exactly -- the same thing. Can't the Post think of new subjects to write about? Or is the Post -- struggling, like so many newspapers, with online competition -- overfond of this sort of thing? Kinsley repeatedly condemns Web writers as "solipsistic." [E]ven in their quieter modes, denizens of the Web seem to lug around huge egos and deeply questionable assumptions about how interesting they and their lives might be to others. Kinsley himself not long ago luxuriated at a series of spas, and then wrote a lengthy article about where he was squeezed and how his toesies felt and shit. I am strapped to a table in a semi-darkened room. Lush, vapid New Age music plays in the background. Two women enter carrying jars of warm peanut butter, one creamy and one crunchy (the peanut butter, that is—don't be vulgar). The women begin slathering the peanut butter on me. ... I have been slathered with [other] unguent[s] [besides] peanut butter, been submerged and sprayed... Is going to spas on a magazine's dime and telling everybody what they did to your body there what Kinsley has in mind by non-solipsistic writing? |