Concluding Unscientific Postscript

As Murrow said: "This just might do nobody any good." But it's time to bring this matter to a close with a final observation.

Blogs serve two purposes, it seems. GWPDA says they're broadsheets. Fair enough. Except they've moved away rapidly from anything approaching Paine's "Common Sense" (no hidden snark there). Now they are settling into "communities." Which is both fine (who am I to complain?) and inevitable (Sociology 101). The pity is, they are communities of the like-minded and fit for political junkies (or food junkies, or diary junkies, etc., etc., etc.)

I didn't mean to offend anyone with my observations, nor to discount anyone else's experiences. But blogs as "the revolution finally realized," is pretty much done with. And I think the canary in the coal mine is the declining number of visitors I keep seeing mentioned on other small blogs. That and the fact that blogs are not taken seriously enough they are mentioned by Hannity and Limbaugh and bloggers have their own special interest group meetings, etc., etc., etc. At best, they have become just another special interest group: not drawing America into a virtual town meeting on line, but giving people too busy to be activists canvassing neighborhoods or organizing protests and demonstrations and mass mailings, an opportunity to be virtually active, too.

Which ain't a bad thing. But sadly, it's hardly revolutionary. To repeat the quote from Alicublog I buried in one of the longer and duller posts below:

Admittedly, not every blogger who goes mwah-ha-ha over what he or she imagines to be the corpse of the "MSM" is the online equivalent of the Simpsons' Cat Lady. But if we are tempted to believe that blogs represent some kind of massive paradigm shift that changes everything forever -- that is, if we forget how foolish that sort of triumphalist blather almost always turns out to be -- we should remind ourselves: Just because someone is using relatively new technology does not necessarily mean that he or she is the wave of the future. The screaming fellow with the Bluetooth earpiece may not in fact be connected; he may in fact be screaming to himself, only using technology to conceal his madness from the world.

Technology is just another way of doing things. But still, at the end of the day, it's just people, doing those things.

Same as it ever was.

Oh, and the new names for this blog now include consideration of:

In Praise of Okra

or

God Bless Okra!