Pox Populi

It’s a funny old word, “blog.” The popular belief is that the word is a contraction of “Web log.” This, however, is incorrect (and it is a mistake that even the venerable Wikipedia makes). In fact, the origin of the word is a matter of some dispute, with two people claiming to have independently invented the word in the early 1990s. The claimants are Howard Josephowitz, a professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Maggie Cocharane a former writer for Wired and later head of the Freedom In Literacy Education (FILE) Foundation. Interestingly, the roots of the neologism that each claims to have invented are similar: for Josephowitz the word came about as a combination of “boring” and “clog,” while Cocharane claims to have merged “banal” and “slog.”

You can see why the idea that “blog” is related to Web Log has caught on instead, however, because it merges two often contradictory social impulses. On the one hand, a “Web Log” evokes the idea of an automated recording process where the writer is part of the vast machinery of the Web and their task is simply to play their part as an innocuous cog and note down what is occurring inside the Web machine, in the way that a piece of software automatically generates a record of its operation. On the other hand, the term evokes the idea of a ship’s log, where the writer is the Captain in charge of the destiny of the ship and its cargo, recording its progress so far and charting where it will go in the future.

This has led to a lot of claims being made for the power of blogging. It is the voice of the people, the raucous clamor of the democratic spirit; it represents the cut and thrust of unfettered intellectual debate, the new public commons, a return to the agora of ancient Greece; a therapeutic outlet, a new kind of writing, a challenge to the domination of vested media interests; a new mechanism for community, a shared space for people to meet and organize; the new politics, the new populism, the new power.

Hokum, hogwash, and horseshit.

Instead of thinking about the definition of the word, for a moment, just think of its sound: “blog.” Bl. Og. It sounds as if it should be a word that describes some kind of tampon or rectal plug, something that is inserted into the cultural arse as an emergency measure to stop vast quantities of liquid shit from spewing out. But that’s the funny thing about English. Sometimes words that you think should mean one thing, turn out to mean the exact opposite.

In fact, “blog” is more akin to some kind of terrible wonder drug, of the kind that the CIA might develop for interrogation purposes, one that is administered to the unlucky “detainee” in a cheese sandwich by the good Gitmo cop and then almost immediately induces simultaneous emesis and diarrhea. Blogging represents the largest mass outbreak of literary Giardia the world has ever seen.

On the plus side, at least we’ve been able to answer that age-old question about whether a million monkeys banging away at a million keyboards will eventually produce Hamlet. The answer is a resounding “no.” They can’t even produce the script for Plan 9 from Outer Space.

But LM, I hear you say, you are a “blogger.” You have a “blog.” You are “blogging.”

No, thank you for pointing that out. How could I have missed such an obvious fallacy in my own argument? Forsooth, I am undone!

I am blogging because, like every good criminal, I have means, motive, and opportunity. I have a computer and web access. I am motivated by the same noble desire that motivates 95% of the blogosphere: to piss on those that deserve such a urinary drenching from a great height. And–again, like the rest of the blogosphere–I obviously have too much time on my hands, time that would be much better spent trying to find a cure for cancer, or solving world hunger, or trying to bring down the military-entertainment-terrorism-industrial complex.

If I possessed the grandiose pretensions of most denizens of the blogophiliac universe I would claim that my blog is in reality a kind of suppository, approaching the patient rectally since it is immune to all other forms of remedy, administering a fatal poison (since a cure is out of the question) trying to shut down this effluent producing system once and for all.

But I am LM, and my goal is only to point out the idiocy and self-delusion inherent in all such pretensions.