{"id":91,"date":"2005-11-23T20:40:06","date_gmt":"2005-11-23T20:40:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/index.php\/2005\/11\/23\/blogs-shallow-and-egotistical\/"},"modified":"2005-11-23T20:40:06","modified_gmt":"2005-11-23T20:40:06","slug":"blogs-shallow-and-egotistical","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2005\/11\/23\/blogs-shallow-and-egotistical\/","title":{"rendered":"Blogs: shallow and egotistical?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Nicholas Carr of roughtype.com &#8212; the guy who wrote a critical and much-cited post earlier this year about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/archives\/2005\/10\/the_amorality_o.php\">the amorality of Web 2.0<\/a> &#8212; is up to his old skeptical tricks again in a recent post entitled &#8220;Jellybeans for breakfast.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>In it, he writes about how blogosphere proponents like to think of what they are doing as a deep, Socratic dialogue on issues &#8212; but Nick says that &#8220;experiencing the blogosphere feels a lot like intellectual hydroplaning &#8211; skimming along the surface of many ideas, rarely going deep. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/archives\/2005\/11\/jellybeans_for_1.php\">It&#8217;s impressionistic, not contemplative.<\/a> Fun? Sure. Invigorating? Absolutely. Socratic? I&#8217;m not convinced. Preferable to the old world? It&#8217;s nice to think so.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>He goes on to say that &#8220;for all the self-important talk about social networks, couldn&#8217;t a case be made that the blogosphere, and the internet in general, is basically an anti-social place, a fantasy of community crowded with isolated egos pretending to connect? Sometimes, it seems like we&#8217;re all climbing up into our own little treehouses and eating jellybeans for breakfast.&#8221; Agree or disagree? I can see Nick&#8217;s point &#8212; and it&#8217;s true that blogging can sometimes deteriorate into a clubby exercise in mutual back-patting, about issues of interest to small group of geeks. <\/p>\n<p>I would have to agree with some of the comments on his post, however (including one from <a href=\"http:\/\/sethf.com\">Seth Finkelstein<\/a>), which argue that many readers of the MSM (mainstream media) have just as shallow a relationship with what they are reading.  At least blogs encourage discussion.  It&#8217;s up to us to ensure that the discussion is worthwhile.<\/p>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nicholas Carr of roughtype.com &#8212; the guy who wrote a critical and much-cited post earlier this year about the amorality of Web 2.0 &#8212; is up to his old skeptical tricks again in a recent post entitled &#8220;Jellybeans for breakfast.&#8221; In it, he writes about how blogosphere proponents like to think of what they are &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2005\/11\/23\/blogs-shallow-and-egotistical\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Blogs: shallow and egotistical?&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}