Vi er en flok tabere

Britiske The Register tager endeligt bladet fra munden og fortæller os bloggere, hvilke kæmpetabere vi er og hvor ligeglade resten af verden er med os. Det var også på tide, at det blev sagt:

"It's not that weblogs are all bad - there are some very good ones, and many are as good as you can expect good-hearted volunteers to be - but a few people staying indoors a bit longer, bashing away solipsisms at their expensive computers - does not make for a social revolution. By definition. Nor are RSS feeds quite the turn-on for the public as atom-smashing, Sputniks or flying cars, and all those things you read about at school, popular culture icons that told us that we must trust the boffins and the world would turn out just fine.

In his Doonesbury strip, Garry Trudeau has already aimed a well-aimed lampoon at this phenomenon: with a series of cartoons last year pointing out the gulf between the webloggers' self-importance and their social marginalisation. In time, no doubt, some wag at Private Eye will discover the 'true' derivation of the word 'blog', which they will explain in Ancient Greek means 'boring'... and a whole new spate of boffin-bashing will begin.

But how did they get into such a mess?

Well, blog-lobbyists have overlooked a couple of truths. Firstly, evangelists for a specific mode or incarnation of a technology, or, if you like, fetishists for a particular kind of tool, usually get filed, quite rightly, alongside members of the tinfoil hat army. Sad, but true. If you can't get laid without your 'tool' - and blog-lobbyists seem to be a bunch of people who can't get laid without showing off their weblog credentials (perhaps they never meet other people except through weblogging?) then the scene does have a bit of a foul hum about it. You have noticed. Noted.

And secondly, the hallmark of a popular mass-market technology is that it kind of slips into people's lives without very much hype. Think of VCRs and mobile phones. Or fax machines. You had one because you thought it was useful, not because someone told you needed to have it. "

Fra http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/69/31716.html