Times of India Article Attacks Bloggers
Posted on October 8, 2006
We've included some very negative articles about bloggers in our Blog Pessimism category but this article published in the Times of India is one of the worst. The article is called "Bloggers' rubbish." Thanks to India Uncut for finding it. The article refers to bloggers as "half-wits, religious maniacs, failed writers, sociopaths and cold-blooded killers."
They are interesting people. They think that they have something to say. They want to be read and heard and seen. But their aspiration is blocked by the obnoxious monster called the Editor and their high-voltage facts mixed with slam-dunk fiction, with a lot of typos and commas and semi-colons in wrong places, go down a drain called the Editorial Process. So they turn to blogging and take refuge under a series of posts on a web page in the form of a diary, with hypertext links to other such diaries. The bloggers love to attack those they hate: from McDonald's to Starbucks to Karl Marx to Mandal to Germaine Greer to the colleague at the next work station. Blogs are an online stream of consciousness written by people who believe that they are under orders from someone to change the world.There are few bad apples out there but we shouldn't let them ruin blogging for everyone. Amit Varma at India Cut points to an article from Steven Berlin Johnson called "Five Things All Sane People Agree On About Blogs And Mainstream Journalism" for a more realistic discussion of blogs and journalism.Good idea. But the pace at which the blogosphere is getting cramped with half-wits, religious maniacs, failed writers, sociopaths and cold-blooded killers, is scary. They all scream so loudly that those talking sense have to drop their decibel levels. Every 10 minutes, some three million new bloggers invade the WWW with a vengeance. It looks like revenge of the amateur who dreams of becoming a reporter. And that's a cause for concern. The editorial content - uncontrolled and unregulated - has made it free for all: In the UK, PayPerPost and Bloggers Republic offer such opinions that would invite legal suits in a newspaper; the US marines are using myspace.com for giving a positive spin to their stories from Iraq, and in Canada, an "angel of death" wrote a blog before shooting at 20 people. Forget wrong grammar and bad spellings, bloggers are now writing murders on the web.