Recently, an acquaintance of mine muttered that the internet would be the death of language. In manner of Acidman, I called bullshit on that. In fact, if one stays away from ‘online chatting,’ the cumulative effect is just the opposite. Enter the almost-daily blogger, stage left.

Blogging, with its willful artifice and subjectivity, its metafictional impulses and emphasis on the play of language, is fundamentally trivial, vain, self-absorbed, and narcissistic. This isn’t to say that our medium’s writers and pundits aren’t dealing with history, politics, and social issues in a significant fashion. Indeed, by opening up discussion threads, one can witness the offering of freely created fictions that oppose publicly accepted ones. The results of this discourse are obvious: (1) Questions about how ideologies are formed, and (2) Apparent processes whereby conventions are developed. As such, blogging is associated with an addictive tendency for individuals to exercise their own imaginative and linguistic powers, lest these powers be thwarted by others.

Of course, caveats persist. If meaning is subjective, and therefore fleeting and ephemeral, how can there be any determinate truth or meaning at all? If reality is constructed by our discourse rather than reflected by it, how can we ever know reality itself, rather than merely knowing our own discourse? Are we all just talking about talk, and do we have any right to claim that one’s interpretation of reality, history or politics is “better” than another’s perspectives? This silly attitude exists that, gotdamn it, that person belongs to several blogging alliances and therefore is linked by a thousand other bloggers, certainly his view must be better than someone whose prose goes largely unnoticed. Nevermind that the quest for the ultimate linkage takes no notice whether anyone really reads that person’s bullshit. Heh. Indeed.