In this week's necessary blog for my blogging class about blogs and bloggers I feel the need to examine celebrity blogs (primarily the need comes from Colin assigning us this task). Celebrity blogs are useless and need to top being called blogs. Celebrities can not blog primarily because it would be a conflict of their private versus public persona.
The problem stems primarily from celebrities being in the public eye and therefore having reputations they need to uphold. The usage of a blog is so a person may get their viewpoints across without feeling they will wreck their reputation. A perfect example is me and my continued need to profess great love to my spinning instructor. Now no one who is reading this knows me personally, nor knows my spinning instructor, and therefore cannot judge me based on my assertion that I love my spinning instructor. I may feel free to write whatever the hell I want without feeling I am somehow damaging my public credibility. Indeed by being frank and honest, there's a sort of Networkian "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" quality to bloggers. I also imagine William Bennett might feel comfortable as a blogger because he has absolutely no reputation left to defend.
But lets be honest, James Wolcott is not blogging. Instead Wolcott is writing a more frequent column and posting it on the web. He is a fantastic writer, a man who I sincerely respect. But his "blogs" are very well thought out columns that he may not have time to fit into Vanity Fair. Clearly the man has a lot of ideas and wishes to get them all said. The only even blogworthy thing on the site is the phrase "POSTED BY JAMES WOLCOTT." Take the "posted" out and you have just another editorial by James Wolcott.
On an entirely different note, I've been thinking a lot about meme theory and how it works and I'm trying to flesh out my ideas a little more. Yesterday, my friend Dave said that I was fighting a proverbial chicken and egg idea in my head by suggesting that memes are what make us social beings. I disagree for a lot of reasons.
Humans do not just talk. We share common ideas with each other that spread like mad. People can't wait to get to work the next day to talk about last night's Desperate Housewives or the movie they saw this weekend. This interactivity is meme theory at its best. If we didn't have fun and exciting memes to pass around, many of us would be totally oblivious to each other. We'd grunt at each other and then move on in a rapid fashion.
Instead, language was developed because people had stories they wanted to share. The Trojan War has many memes in it, and therefore has been successfully transmitted so well in society. So while I think Dave has a point in thinking I am just making a chicken and egg argument, I think it goes deeper. We don't create memes because we feel the need to converse with one another. Instead we feel the need to converse because of memes and how exciting they are.
This next couple days I might be out of touch because of my holidays. While I'm not particularly religious, my family might be offended if I sat around on their computers and updated my blogs. I don't want anyone throwing brisket at me (again).
Happy New Year to all my Jewish posse.
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