Two people who – as usual – have managed to find specious grounds to bitch about the weblogging event at the House of Parliament yesterday: (1) Andrew Orlowski (2) Simon Kent (hitherto) from 2lmc.org. Some people seem to be able to find Andrew’s permanently dribbling bile gland entertaining – and a few seem to find it genuinely informative – presumably in the way that people who want to have their prejudices confirmed get value from the Daily Mail. I have quite a lot of trouble with this way of reading – “Well, he confirms my prejudices, so he must be right” – just as I have trouble with him continuing to reference previous work of his even when pretty much every ‘fact’ inside that ‘work’ has been been demonstrated to be full of (at best) unsupported speculation and at worst demonstrably wrong.
It’s almost not worth engaging with the body of this latest piece, except to say that while Andrew is bitching (yet again) about how useless weblogs are and how politicians must find the whole thing ridiculous, said politicians are talking at events in the House of Commons (like this one) explaining how useful they’re finding them.
As to Simon Kent, I think it’s this kind of determined negativity and workaday sniping that pisses me off the most about debates like this. I’ll be honest – I simply don’t think I’m able to understand the type of person who gets pleasure out of such dreary, repetitive, contentless complaining. More precisely, I really don’t understand the idea that there is much in the way of meaningful qualitative data (are they shit or not) about people that can be derived from simply grouping together everyone who uses the same tool no matter what said people plan to do with it. I mean if a fishmonger buys a mobile phone and a nuclear scientist buys a similar mobile phone, does that make them “Mophers”, who can be easily dismissed as a group of weirdos and idiots? Of course not – and why? Because we are able to see that the tool is valuable and useful (even as it is profoundly simple in concept) and that it could facilitate every kind of speech from shouting about the price of fish to discussing atomic physics. The irony of the whole thing is that Simon (and 2lmc) perpetually demonstrate their own discomfort with people who make these kinds of insanely vacuous value judgments when – despite the fact thay run sites that are patently weblogs – they continually deny that they’re in any way associated with them. Why? Because fundamentally they’re finding the form useful while not wanting to be associated with (or subsumed within) the stereotypes (that they themselves perpetrate) of the collective. To which I can only reply – hopefully with only the most complicit of irones – join the damn club…