Why I Hate Blogs So Much

Since I like to always be first among the people I'd shoot for doing things I don't understand, and largely think are wastes of time, I thought I'd post the most cogent example yet of my gripes with blogs, including mine. Cory posted a different except of Danny's same post, but I like this selection better, and besides, Doctorow totally didn't include O'Brien's emphasis, which totally through me for a loop and made the exceprt make even less sense to me. But then, that's what caused me to read Danny's whole piece anyway, so perhaps I shouldn't bitch too much. I'm a pedant, leave me alone.

Caveat contridictor; I don't think this about all blogs, just lots of them. Clearly not the ones I like. Of course not. But you knew that.

On the net, you have public, or you have secrets. The private intermediate sphere, with its careful buffering. is shattered. E-mails are forwarded verbatim. IRC transcripts, with throwaway comments, are preserved forever. You talk to your friends online, you talk to the world.

This is why, incidentally, why people hate blogs so much. My God, people say, how can Livejournallers be so self-obsessed? Oh, Christ, is Xeni talking about LA art again? Why won't they all shut up?

The answer why they won't shut up is - they're not talking to you. They're talking in the private register of blogs, that confidential style between secret-and-public. And you found them via Google. They're having a bad day. They're writing for friends who are interested in their hobbies and their life. Meanwhile, you're standing fifty yards away with a sneer, a telephoto lens and a directional microphone. Who's obsessed now?

But they have an alternative. They can just keep it to themselves. Write it in their diary. They must secretly want me to read it, if they put in online, right? You say they're saying these things to a small group, but why don't they just keep it to that small group.

The answer is: most of them do, but you don't hear about them. And if you did, you'd be even more furious. Because now we enter the world of the secret register. There's only one thing wore than reading a public mailing list where people are talking crap. And that's seeing a private mailing list that you can't even join to find out what crap they're talking. Haddock, silent-tristero, that Bcc: list you were on and now are not. They're up to something there.

There are only two registers on the Net; public and secret. In the public sphere, everything you say is for everyone. Talk in the secret register, and you have something to hide.

And this is what the end of privacy means. It means the end of the private register. Not everything that is private is meant to be secret, meant to be hidden. It's just not intended to be public. That grey area is fading, and soon it will be gone.

I think Danny used "register" here not only because it made sense, but because it was too delicious of an otherwise generally apropos term to use given the name of Andrew Orlowski's employer, but I might have selected "context" in the interest of seeming to be less hard to parse. So it goes.

I usually go as (not by) "Dan" with most of my friends, "Daniel" to part of my family, "Danny" to another. At times, I hate being called "Danny", and at others, I wished I were called "Danny" more often. None of this has anything to do with Danny other than he seems roundly more secure in his name than I. Perhaps he's just more uniformly addressed.