The New York Times has an amusing article today about blogging. It’s essentially the same idea as most articles or mainstream media treatments these days. Blogging is an addiction (therefore morally suspect), people sit on the toilet and blog into their laptops for hours (even on their anniversaries!!!) and ruin their relationships, people who blog have no lives outside of blogging (so why do they have jobs and relationships, then?), bloggers are only read by immediate family and a few weird lurkers and strangers, people who blog are so obsessed with their activity that they’ll opt to blog instead of doing paying work, etc., etc., etc.
Yes, bloggers are truly a scourge. In this paragraph, the Times encourages the identification of blogging with other unidentified nasty, pernicious, antisocial habits:
Blogging is a pastime for many, even a livelihood for a few. For some, it becomes an obsession. Such bloggers often feel compelled to write several times daily and feel anxious if they don’t keep up. As they spend more time hunkered over their computers, they neglect family, friends and jobs. They blog at home, at work and on the road. They blog openly or sometimes, like Mr. Wiggins, quietly so as not to call attention to their habit.
As Steve points out, if blogs are so unsavory, why did the Times article link to six of them?
