Follow the Bouncing Blogger

Happy New Year Thoughts
Will Blogs *Really* Replace the Mainstream Media?

It's been a bit of time since my last post. Three days before Xmas, in fact, but there was just so much else to do for all of that. I got some cool stuff - most notably a small tripod and a card-reader for my trip to Mexico. I'll be gone for six weeks but I may get inspired to write something about being crazy, which a friend was kind enough to remind me was my One True Area of Expertise. He gets hypermedia - I get hyper. Some deal.

Appropos of nada: Last night, I flipped out for the first time in months. It had been building, but I thought I had things under control. And I guess I did, because really, it didn't feel "out of control." It was more like a controlled rage, one I stepped into in order to let off some steam, feel the adrenaline coursing, to get a handle on the jillion thoughts that tend to accompany these things.

I beat my DVD player to death. Just picked it up by its power cord and flailed it on the ground. It was really really satisfying, ultimately, because I bought the thing eighteen months ago from a woman who used to be a friend but just stabbed me in the back and dumped my friendship like it meant nothing to her. Now the player is in the dumpster, along with another memory of her, just one less thing that reminds me of what a Rude Fucking Cunt she was. Maybe I'll post a picture later...

There. That's better.

Onto news: Right before I stopped for the holiday-time, I was thinking a lot about the situation about Rigoberto Alpizar, in particular, the subject of the post for December 13th, wherein I "revealed" that the story was Absolutely Dead in the mainstream media - and thus, out of the blogosphere as well. The world moved on THAT FAST from a man shot down in cold blood on the tarmac of a Miami airport by a bunch of lame fed-pigs - all because they were smart enough to flood the media with tales of his "unpredictable" behaviour brought on by bipolar disorder.

And I had to think about the reality of this "media hobby." As a blogger, I'm really just an armchair commentator wherein I surf the Internet looking for links to link to and comment on. Or maybe I get to write about "My own weird life," or whatever. But when it comes to "breaking news" - if the mainstream press stops writing about the story, there's nothing to link to. Thus, interest in the story just *fucking* disappears. Poof. Overnight. And maybe there's a trickle of blogposts and then - Poof. No one cares. Who's Angelina Jolie fucking this week?

In the case of the Rigoberto Alpizar story, despite my utter lack of editorial credentials at the moment and my zero-based budget, I *do* know enough about what to do next and I *did* make a call to the Miami-Dade police department, wherein I was told that "all legitimate inquiries into the investigation" should be sent via company letterhead to XYZ-PDQ dickheaded spokesperson, blah-blah. I asked how I would go about being placed on whatever electronic press release mailing list they have down there and was told pretty much the same thing.

Am I going to follow up? No. Probably not. Maybe. Maybe in a few months I'll run across my own dumb blog post and go, "Hey, whatever happened to that...?" And I'll make another call. But the point is that most bloggers wouldn't even go that far. It's not because they're lame and dumb and boring - it's because the blogosphere relies on SPEED and FREQUENT POSTS even more than a daily newspaper. They need fresh churn on fresh stories or they'll DIE A FAST DEATH. If you don't believe me - check out the Number One blog on the Internet - those guys are great, but they're hardly doing more than checking their email for press releases from PR slacks with goofy products or weird ideas to pitch to them. Not a lot of investigation going on there. and that's hardly a replacement for mainstream news, no matter how slanted and sucky it is.

Though I've been thinking about this sad state of the "blog-revolution" for weeks, I was inspired to sit down and punch it out by my friend Mark Pesce's HyperPeople presentation, which I was watched/listened to last night on my new favorite form of web-crack - Google Video. ("GOOGLE IT!!!" - snicker.)

I'm linking to it because it's a pretty great and interesting way of summing up a lot of what's happening on the web these days - but the bit about the blogosphere is a little bit hard for me to swallow, a little bit too "Internet revolution, circa 1994," - because like a lot of the empty promises about how an Information Revolution was going to change the world as we know it, it fails to take into account that FREE MEDIA doesn't necessarily mean GOOD MEDIA. If boing-boing is any indication, it just means a lot more clutter and trivia (like this blog, for example) and a lot fewer answers about What the Fuck is Really Going On.

ps: Just remember, if you still don't believe me - Plamegate was not daily news (and it's almost played out by now too) until Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald brought an indictment against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby - an event that ALL the mainstream news outlets covered in full technicolor glory. A lot of the post facto revelations that hit the news since then had been floating around the blogosphere for over two years, including (especially) the news that the "intelligence" was bogus. Remember the 10 Downing Street Memo? And no one cared - really cared - until they heard it on CNN.

Comments? (yes, I want them.)

Technorati Tags: rigoberto alpizar, rage, hyperpeople, blogs, blogosphere, blog revolution, mainstream news, plamegate

posted by by gregoryp(tm) aka Gregory Pleshaw @ 4:48 PM