Live it, don't just blog it

I've just spent a delightful afternoon in the cosy surrounds of the James Squire Brewhouse with some well-informed friends watching the Midterm Midtacular results on CNN. Between the dozen of us, there were enough smart-arse remarks, well-formed observations and generally intelligent questions to make the afternoon a fun one. Sure, the flash looking big-screen TV was an essential part of our election-info diet, but it was an event to be enjoyed collectively.

Not so the blogosphere. After arriving home, I've logged on to see what the rest of the world has to say, and I'm startled by the obsessiveness of many bloggers. There were countless bloggers who took it upon themselves to blog the events of the evening in excrutiating detail, with every twist and turn documented for all eternity.

Sure, I admire their commitment to their craft, but here's what I don't get: why did these clearly intelligent and well-informed people spend their election night whiling away the hours in front of their computer screens when there were many an election party to be enjoyed? Would their time have not been better spent enjoying victory or commisserating defeat in the arms of friends, no doubt whilst imbibing a Dennis Hastert-like quantity of ale? Or, and this is the intriguing thing, are their on-line buddies now their circle of friends, with a big night spent with them being preferable to one in the company of flesh-and-blood humans?

Happy Democrats
Victorious Democrats, moments before returning to their computers to blog all about it.

Comments

K said…
Just a quess but perhaps their offline friends are not interested in watching or listening or talking about politics. Perhaps they are sport only get together friends.
9 November 2006 at 08:27
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thanks for all the fish

After 13 years with Blogspot, I've shifted blogging platform. So (drumroll, please), you can find my new blog here . Ari on the Web will stay online, so you can scroll through the archives for all sorts of embarrassing tidbits. To make it easier to find some of my writing on particular themes, I've grouped some pieces together under a few labels: Cancer Fatherhood Indonesia travels North Korea travels United States travels Undergraduate days   So as they say here in my new home of Japan, so long, and thanks for the all the fish.
Read more

Can conspicuous consumption save the news business?

Image
It’s a dire time for the news industry. Readers are flooding to social media for content, advertisers are moving with them and costs are being cut at a brutal rate in a desperate bid to meet falling revenue. It is increasingly clear that business models that depend on amassing large audiences in order to provide a forum for advertising will always struggle against the “niche of one” audience that social media platforms can provide for advertisers. There’s been lots of talk lately about ways to fund public interest journalism. One idea is to tax the online aggregators – Facebook and Google, primarily – that sell advertising against the news content of others to support news organisations. Another is to make news subscriptions or donations to its producers tax deductible.  Both ideas are worth considering, but they do not abrogate the need for news organisations to seek better ways to draw revenue from consumers.  (It is alarming that discussion of efforts to...
Read more

A place to rest my head

Image
I dream one day of visiting Pyongyang and staying in the wonderfully pyramidic Ryugyong Hotel. The outer shell of this hotel which dominates the Pyongyang skyline was built in the 1980s, and the interior was, well, never built. It seems possible that the project was commenced in a pique of optimism as North Korea put in a claim to share the 1988 Olympic Games with its southern brothers, but just as the offer was rejected - just like the bid to share the 2002 Soccer World Cup failed on the basis of North Korea's request to host the Opening Ceremony, Semi Finals and Final - the hotel was never completed. Nowadays, in stands pointing to the sky much the way that Kim Il Sung's statue does, both perhaps as a symbol of the excesses of North Korean enthusiasm. Instead of the Ryugyong, like most foriegn visitors to Pyongyang I found myself staying at the Yanggakdo Hotel. The Yanggakdo Hotel is a slice of Cold War Bondesque paranoia writ large. The hotel is located on an isla...
Read more