If you really want attention as a writer right now, you take to social media. Believe me, blogging is not the way to go anymore, especially if you are a lone wolf who says fuck too much to merit a slot on a site that is deep-rooted into the popular social media outlets.
My host allows me to post onto Facebook, Twitter, and some other places I don’t understand. I’m public, so god knows where I end up. But it’s clumsy, and it brings very few readers. That’s due largely to my own shortcomings as a writer, critic and also the death of the blogosphere as we once knew it. If you look over to your right, you’ll see that I have a blogroll. For you youngsters who are looking at that term askance, it’s a list of links that I used to go to every day for the news and to look for subject matter of my own. If I wanted to preserve what’s left of the blogosphere, I’d be clicking on those links and embedding their content in my own because the click and the link is currency. It can confer money and legitimacy. But I don’t do that anymore, because I am hooked on my Facebook feed for information which is actually highly inadvisable because of the level of misleading bullshit you can get yourself caught up in. It is the Age Of Meme. I should change my ways, but the social media current is hellaciously strong and is killing good content providers if they don’t swim with the tide.
As I’ve said here many times, the best of the bloggers got paying gigs at already established news outlets. Actually, I shouldn’t really say “best” because some really embarrassing, idiotic stuff gets supercharged velocity and that’s partly because many of us are poor consumers of information, typically content with places that specialize in confirming our particular bias.
But oh, what fun was had with bloggers who had the twin sisters of velocity and idiocy traveling with them. Looking for game to take down was really fun. We’d gleefully fisk and debunk and ridicule our ideological enemies when they went too far into the stupid.
Yeah, we were all amateur political geeks, what of it?
Some of us were gifted humorists and some of us knew how to professionally connect the dots on an issue. Straight media eventually realized that the conversation was moving from print to digital, and there was a mad scramble to scarf up writers who had daily eyeballs long before the news departments had even heard of “blogs”.
Myself, I have been writing online on and off for almost twenty years. This is the third blog that I’ve actually curated and cared for. In my travels I got to write for Roger Ailes, earned the ire of Jeff Goldstein, the paste-eating, hypersensitive and neurotic owner of Protein Wisdom, and I guess I said something witty about smug Canuck Mark Steyn and he quoted me. I also had a wild bipolar fugue that began this little site where some of my friends came to watch me melt down.
I just want to say that since blogging as an information outlet is breathing a little more shallowly each day, I had fun flying alongside you semi-pros until you made the grade. But I’m not going anywhere just because the medium is shrinking in its power. I’ll still be doing what I have been doing here, for personal and political reasons.
So anyway, let’s talk about two old schoolers. I’m gonna shout out to David Neiwert, who has carefully detailed the rise of the right wing since 2003 on his blog Orcinus so well that he’s now doing work at the SPLC. He’s also gotten the opportunity to write books about his first and second loves. David’s living the blogger’s dream.
What did David do recently? Ah, he gave a little bit of derisive attention to one Jonah Goldberg, who I presumed dead or at least laughed out of the punditry business.
Nope. He’s actually cobbled together quite a CV (although his mother helped blaze his trail for him and many others by being a founding mother of the “freepers“). But you fellow lefty bloggers will always know him better as The Doughy Pantload.
Once again, geeky inside baseball. But that’s how we’d roll against the perpetually wrong in the online community.
Jonah has been living the dream too, helping pioneer NRO, and penning a 500 page book called “Liberal Fascism”, which appears to be at a quick spec a whataboutist screed that completely ignores the fascistic tendencies of the American right. It sounds like a very long “I’m just saying” that stops well short of suggesting that the Nazis and the left are the same thing.