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The New York Times editorial page struck again today with a stupid navel gazer about blogging. The Daily Howler nails it, as usual:
DEEP THOUGHTS BY JACK HANDY: Someone decided it was time to wax eloquent. So the Times began to ponder the Net. In the process, someone even wrote this:The Times harped on the sheer staggering number of blogs, as if to say, they're like mayflies, and could never be as important as centralized, edited media. Reality check: some blogs are better than others, some are better than the mainstream press, most disappear after a few weeks--which ones do you think Times worries about enough to try to trivialize?NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (8/5/05): It's natural enough to think of the growth of the blogosphere as a merely technical phenomenon. But it's also a profoundly human phenomenon, a way of expanding and, in some sense, reifying the ephemeral daily conversation that humans engage in.“Hmm,” we quickly found ourselves wondering. Have we been engaged in “a profoundly human phenomenon, a way of expanding and, in some sense, reifying the ephemeral daily conversation that humans engage in?”
We gave it some thought, and then we replied: “In a sense—but not as such!”
The growth of the blogosphere is “a profoundly human phenomenon, a way of expanding and, in some sense, reifying the ephemeral daily conversation that humans engage in?” In fact, blogs became necessary when the perfumed royals of mainstream media began to write, think, cogitate and generally waste time like that.
A PREDICTION: This sentence will gain the most ridicule: “Perhaps the strongest indicator of the importance of blogdom [is] the extent to which media outlets are creating blogs—or bloglike manifestations—of their own.” As we’ve long said—if these lords of self-importance didn’t exist, no one could ever dream them up.
Some pieces of mine hanging in the curator's office at Lothringer Dreizehn, an art space located at Lothringer Strasse 13 in Munich. The curator, Courtenay Smith, originally showed the work in her gallery homeroom. Hand drawn using the old computer program MSPaintbrush, the images of what I would call everyday media women were shown a couple of times in New York in the late '90s. I emailed a set of .BMP files to Smith in 2000 and she printed them on a medical plotter and "stretched" (i.e., folded) the paper on canvas stretchers. Her set actually looks better than the ones I printed here in the States.