Dana #1HS: Blogging Without Balls
We've been courting Dana #1HS forever to come out of retirement and take a seat at the YM contributor trough but she keeps serving us with crappy "grad school" and "parole officer" excuses. Mainly we hope to harvest her estrogen for time travel but there's a certain communal comfort when you find someone who hates all the same things you do. We'd call her YM's Cocktease but that schtick is already taken. In the meantime, she emails it in.
I'd barely even heard of this apparently Famed Web 2.0 Strategist before yesterday and I fucking hate him today. I know I sound like a dinosaur here, but it just shocks me that anyone gives a shit about "vlogging." It's twice as self-indulgent as regular blogging because unlike the written word your audience can't SKIM OVER THE BORING PARTS. I don't subscribe to a single vlogger feed. Not even for my folder labeled "Assholes and Morans."
Read more...At some point last year, I entertained the idea of becoming one of those consultants who goes and explains "Web 2.0" to corporations and gets paid five grand a day to do it. Not because I wanted to--because it just SEEMS so fucking easy. But now, I'm realizing that the internet (yes, the Web if you want to get technical) has passed me by. What a relief. I hate PowerPoint.
The beauty of all this 2.0 whatever? That the blogging medium is touted--by naifs and disingenuous hucksters alike--as the great equalizer, a free exchange of ideas where everyone has a voice &c. Yet in reality it generally mirrors the mainstream media--the white guys are in charge, the only women who succeed are pretty, too many bloggers of color are treated like the One Black Friend You Had at Wesleyan, and misogyny is pervasive, even in places it shouldn't be (Markos Moulitsas is the ultimate example of this--the armchair warrior with a history of sexism and refusal to ever apologize for it--start here for a primer). Actually, there's a rich pageant of sexism and misogyny in the left-wing online community, due in part to the fact that most of the men who have the time to argue with strangers on the web (and navigate--and RATE--idiotic threaded comments--so '98) don't have a lot of experience with women in the meatspace. And the only men who are willing to stand up to them are a bunch of effete (by which I mean the REAL definition of the word) jerk-offs.
Eh, I hate Democrats anyway. Twenty years from now--after, of course, the Jackass Party has failed over and over again to effect any significant change whatsoever--adenoidal blowhards like Loren "I Have a Girl's Name" Feldman will be rototilling their lord's demesne and reminiscing (not unlike their useless fucking hippie parents once did) about what visionary trailblazers they were.
Fortunately, I know how to shoot a gun, I learned all about homemade abortions in '92 from the Women's Action Coalition...and I have a Seal-a-Meal.
And then, the tables'll have turned. To quote Jello Biafra: "Which would you prefer/a computer or a gun?/the sharks outlived the dinosaurs, you know."
I'd barely even heard of this apparently Famed Web 2.0 Strategist before yesterday and I fucking hate him today. I know I sound like a dinosaur here, but it just shocks me that anyone gives a shit about "vlogging." It's twice as self-indulgent as regular blogging because unlike the written word your audience can't SKIM OVER THE BORING PARTS. I don't subscribe to a single vlogger feed. Not even for my folder labeled "Assholes and Morans."
Read more...At some point last year, I entertained the idea of becoming one of those consultants who goes and explains "Web 2.0" to corporations and gets paid five grand a day to do it. Not because I wanted to--because it just SEEMS so fucking easy. But now, I'm realizing that the internet (yes, the Web if you want to get technical) has passed me by. What a relief. I hate PowerPoint.
The beauty of all this 2.0 whatever? That the blogging medium is touted--by naifs and disingenuous hucksters alike--as the great equalizer, a free exchange of ideas where everyone has a voice &c. Yet in reality it generally mirrors the mainstream media--the white guys are in charge, the only women who succeed are pretty, too many bloggers of color are treated like the One Black Friend You Had at Wesleyan, and misogyny is pervasive, even in places it shouldn't be (Markos Moulitsas is the ultimate example of this--the armchair warrior with a history of sexism and refusal to ever apologize for it--start here for a primer). Actually, there's a rich pageant of sexism and misogyny in the left-wing online community, due in part to the fact that most of the men who have the time to argue with strangers on the web (and navigate--and RATE--idiotic threaded comments--so '98) don't have a lot of experience with women in the meatspace. And the only men who are willing to stand up to them are a bunch of effete (by which I mean the REAL definition of the word) jerk-offs.
Eh, I hate Democrats anyway. Twenty years from now--after, of course, the Jackass Party has failed over and over again to effect any significant change whatsoever--adenoidal blowhards like Loren "I Have a Girl's Name" Feldman will be rototilling their lord's demesne and reminiscing (not unlike their useless fucking hippie parents once did) about what visionary trailblazers they were.
Fortunately, I know how to shoot a gun, I learned all about homemade abortions in '92 from the Women's Action Coalition...and I have a Seal-a-Meal.
And then, the tables'll have turned. To quote Jello Biafra: "Which would you prefer/a computer or a gun?/the sharks outlived the dinosaurs, you know."
