Teh Mind Booglereth: I WAS ONCCCCE A MAAAAAAAAN
Internet success: it shouldn't happen.
Being a success on the internet should be like the equivalent of waking up one morning as Quasimodo: people should be throwing rotten cabbages at you as you are wheeled down the streets, you should be chased into cathedrals with pitchforks and torches, you should be found dead in a Parisian catacomb, clutching the dessicated corpse of your beloved Gypsy woman of choice.
You should never want internet success. This is why the internet sucks, and blogging sucks, and Twitter sucks, and everything sucks and you suck and I suck. Sucky sucky suckaroo Magoo.
First off, the lack of journalistic ethics is somewhat dumbfounding in the blogging community. Do they still call it "blogging" now? It seems like that would be one of those terms that would be outdated 5 days after it's coined, like "Surfing the Information Superhighway" was circa 1994. Blogging requires absolutely no training, no statement of sources, and relies almost solely on gossip and hearsay. If you're a conservative blogger, 99% of your "articles" will be thinly cribbed Free Republic rants. If you're a liberal blogger, 98% of your "articles will be thinly cribbed Huffington Post rants. Yes, you're 1% better than conservatives, libbies. If you're like me, and you are an e/n opine writer, a full 100% of everything you say or do has already been covered by Seanbaby and Matt Carracappa in 1998, or if you're very clever maybe you can slide in some Charlie Brooker and hope nobody notices your source, and you dread the inevitable when Brooker finds your blog and mercilessly reams you on Screenburn.
The agonizingly annoying thing about blogging, from the perspective of reading, is that so many bloggers actively push the idea that they somehow found these sources themselves. Everybody in the show really does think they're that interesting. Even worse, bloggers have a tendency to supply each other with ego boosts. The highest goal of your average low-on-the-totem-pole blogger (sup?) is to get linked on Kotaku or Wonkette or whatever your favorite blog happens to be, which fill their daily crap quotient linking to other blogs. It's a vicious circle, inescapable except by just not caring.
Second, just not caring.
You're not allowed to be seen caring what other people read on your blog, all the while actually caring what everybody thinks about it. There's the tendency toward the Geocities Site Hit Paradox. If you mention you want site hits, they never come. Nobody wants to read the opinions of a shameless hit gigolo. It's sort of a subtle undercurrent of etiquette that sort of reminds me of the various unstated court politics of the Gormenghast novels. We're all a bunch of toadying fops, standing around waving lacy handkerchiefs and hoping, praying that somebody will notice how much we don't care if they notice us.
Third, people who write blogs are generally the least informed people I know (sup?). This is because blogs have to cater to a very specific niche. If a blog tries to expand away from soundtracks to 1980s Italian giallo flicks, the difference between the Sega Genesis and the Dreamcast, or the gross national product of Sweden as a representation of delusional persecution disorders, it suddenly starts to step on the toes of another, better, blog, likely with more readers. Suddenly, the envy creeps in. The instant obsession to constantly check up on your competition becomes the number one priority. You start to actually become one of those insufferable asswipes who are insiders. You start dropping names, you start posting pictures of yourself at Comic Con with Thomas Lennon, you start laying out your insipid theories about comedy and horror in comparison to Krod Mandoon.
Soon, you start grasping for more. You start to wonder why you're not on VH1 yakking about how much you love the 90s. You notice Michelle Malkin (THAT CUNT!) on Fox News. You smell the sour stench of Bruce Vilanche's yeasty skin flaps. You start thinking to yourself, "I wish I too was a flavor-of-two-minutes-ago pundit!"
Then, you are. And suddenly you're one of them: the bloggers who betrayed their roots and no longer speak for the little guy. The little guys now loathe you for it (secretly envious of your late night chats with Shepard Smith), the big guys no longer care about you because you're generally too little too late on your chosen area of expertise, and worse still, you're tied for life to being "that one crazy". You're concretely solidified within whatever opinions you offered, and you can never, ever, ever deviate from it, lest you expose yourself as the shamelessly pandering fraud that you actually are.
You become a cartoon.
And not an amusing cartoon about a cartoon mouse constantly outwitting a cartoon cat.
Oh, and something about Twitter. Er, Twitter sucks. Twitter is where the internet goes to piss on the neighbor's couch after a night out.
