Oh I feel old

And to think I knew you then, back when.

I realized the other day that one of the bloggers I read regularly has a child looking at colleges who was a toddler when I started reading his blog.

For me personally, my oldest is 11, and I was commenting here before he was born.

Indeed. I still miss The Valve.

I think the quoted passage is peculiar to say the least. Maybe there is a “new reading environment,” but it doesn’t seem to have affected the parts of the blogosphere I look at. Don’t think I’m going to bother reading the piece from which the passage is taken.

”Buy me a drink, will you, lad”?

MeToo – as who wants to be reminded at a time where we still trusted bloggers like Glenn Greenwald?

Nowadays everybody on the Intertubes is ”our enemy” -(just joking) – and especially writers who complain about the NYTimes or that ”The system will not be satisfied until it has made op-ed writers of us all”.
I always complain about the NYT too – because all I want -(and have wanted) – that they once – just once headline an article about FF von Clownstick with what Robert DeNiro said…

Bill Benson @ 3:

Thanks. The song makes much more sense Russian style. Much less like just sentimental tripe.

Reading that article it occurs to me that much of what passes for “dialogue” in many online venues is little more than the reciprocal denunciations characteristic of competing religious sects.

Feh.

The last line of the quoted article:

“The system will not be satisfied until it has made op-ed writers of us all.”

Yeah, it’s done that to me already, but I won’t be satisfied until the system starts paying me like I was some Times op-ed writer.

I ignored blogs for a long time because I didn’t see much advantage over usenet, and myself I knew how to write html (and for that matter, I could write code to autogenerate it myself, and did…).

There was an irritating tick back then for the “blogosphere” to act like they’d invented everything and they had invented computers. One thing about the present day era when more than half of the people have signed up for facebook, whatever happens next, the people involved aren’t going to think nothing like it has been done before…

“Unlike the great controversialists — Hitchens, Cockburn, Paglia — her prose is outrageous only in its dreariness.” I do not trust this nostalgia . . .

“Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.”

But then it never was.

I never could really get into The Valve, though I’ll admit I only gave it a handful of tries. Still, do come to Melbourne and I’ll buy you a drink!

I keep trying to click ‘like’ on the one-line comments.

“As late as the 1990s, despite the lurid fan pages and dank chat rooms of the early internet, there was presumed to be a gulf between these two constituencies. Even with Fox News ascendant and internet news ever more dominant, …

mass media institutions remained monolithic enough to manufacture consent. ”

THIS is the most important statement of the article, and nobody even notices it.

anon

another commentstream of the old upon the new:
Wil Wheaton’s done.

Thing about the blogosphere and commentariat was how white, male and middle-aged it was

Doesn’t that rather depend on which blogs one was reading?

The movie Network is supposedly assessed now as clairvoyant about telling people to use their windows (hah–Windows) to yell about how they were mad as hell and couldn’t take it anymore.

Chayefsky couldn’t have known that his satire of such limited broadcast telly could be translated into then inconceivable multi-media internet blueprints that might take down the very country his work was (I hope) meant to self-criticize and save. Limbaugh was one initial catalyst ironically on old-school radio–which then Fox duplicated Network-style on the telly–which then the internet permutated via social media fixation based on the very sorts of collectively destructive economics that Network attempted to deride.

I’m mad as hell. I’m shouting though Windows. And my anger will be inevitably be turned to profit those whom I’m most angry about, by taking my anger and transmuting it into clickable info that is harmless for affecting real change, but profits themselves by merely repetitively and exhibiting it in endless exposure to encourage even more profitable reactively countered–but more importantly clickable–info.

The problem is that these multi-media interests in profits-above-all have unpredictable effects on other large social institutions like democracies. Until, of course, they affect their bottom lines. Then they get engaged only to save themselves.

Doesn’t that rather depend on which blogs one was reading?

True, but I was thinking of the Golden Age of Blogging when there seemed to be quite a small number of widely read blogs that linked to each other

@36
”I’m mad as hell”.

As it seems to be – that a lot of blogs – and a lot of ”Engels” have turned into permanent shouters of: I’m as mad as hell and of the – one of the ”headmaster” of the temple of doom-(salon) nowadays writes:
”It illustrates the chaos and extremism that can ensue when a large sector of the population, for valid reasons, loses all faith in institutions of authority and in the political class”.
It might be worth mentioning – that losing ”all faith in institutions of authority” -(blogs included?) is NOT a good enough excuse to turn – to (into?) babbling babies.

When ”good” people ”loses all faith in institutions of authority and in the political class” – they really try to improve ”the situation” – and don’t come up with the absolute worst possible alternative.

It shows how far we’ve come from the days of Chayefsky, that now I turn on my TV set and I get … nothing. I live in a city of 10 million people and there’s no English-language TV. I can watch TV in Korean, Chinese or Spanish, but not English. It’s like the days of television that started back when I was a child have passed by, gone their way and come to an end. Like the end of PanAm.

I remember the Golden Age of Blogging. I don’t remember it as being “white, male and middle-aged”. Well OK, maybe the big-name blogs. I rarely read them as they were so predictable. But it wasn’t hard to find interesting blogs by women and younger people. However the underrepresentation of people of color was definitely true. There were a few non-white voices out there, but definitely in the minority.

It’s hard now to imagine how one could resurrect those few, those happy blogs for these dour despondent days.

I miss Fafblog.

because Obama was not able to fix everything instantly and avoid all compromise with the forces of evil, that meant he was no better than Bush?

Or maybe because he carried on Bush’s agenda of endless imperialist war, ramped up extra-judicial murders and put in place a machine for mass deportations that paved the way for fascism?

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/us/politics/obama-as-wartime-president-has-wrestled-with-protecting-nation-and-troops.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?destination=%2fopinions%2fobamas-drone-war-is-a-shameful-part-of-his-legacy%2f2016%2f05%2f05%2fa727eea8-12ea-11e6-8967-7ac733c56f12_story.html%3f
https://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/ice-and-border-patrol-abuses/border-patrol-was-monstrous-under-obama-imagine

Fafblog! Thanks, CDT at 44 and oldster at 45! I just lost a large chunk of my evening to Giblets, Fafnir, and the Medium Lobster! All better than I remembered.

“Something strange happened to curdle their outlook . . . ” Reading over the last year or two of Fafblog posts, I did worry that Fafblog’s narrative arc might have landed, a dozen years later, at Qanon. Sigh. Yes, curdled.

Re: Fafblog “curdling” (let alone going off the deep end Qanon-style), I really didn’t see it. It seemed more like, as AcademicLurker said, there was a strong assumption that we were supposed to “go back to normal” when Obama was elected – and indeed, a fair number of people were not just hoping for “normal”, but change, which made Obama essentially telling the movement that had gathered around him during the campaign “Okay, go sit down now; your work is done, I’ll take it from here” more than a little disillusioning. But part of the “normal” that we were supposed to aspire to was ceasing to care about a fair number of troubling American foreign policy issues that had been rallying cries during the Bush years. Even if little had changed, we were supposed to bite our tongues because otherwise we’d be “giving ammunition to the enemy” by criticizing “our team”. Fafblog did not accept that, and stayed angry about what they’d been angry about before (because they were always angry, even if they layered it under wit and sarcasm), with the events (and “serious” Americans’ ambivalence WRT) Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories being a recurrent theme. Fafblog’s brief, straight-faced run on Twitter after they stopped blogging made that very clear, though I imagine a lot of old-school Fafblog readers missed that period entirely.

The biggest change I felt pre- and post-2008 was a lot of activists awakening to the fact that many of the voices that had cried angrily at their sides for 8 years had bought into the growing strict tribalist paradigm (and/or aged out of their “activist phase”), and were very eager to get on with their lives rather than remaining engaged.

Cosma saith:

“There are, in my humble opinion, vanishingly few (though not quite zero) blogs whose comments are worth reading or participating in. I will not name them here, because I don’t want them spoiled.”

He meant us, I can tell. He just wanted to spare our blushes.

they started their political blogging as a bit naive-hawkish-and-left-skeptical

As per my comment above, this constituency seemed to me to be hugely over-represented