"Simultaneously Overwhelming and Trivial"

Wherein Our Heroine Promises to Stop Going on About this. Really. Maybe Tomorrow.

In the comments to yesterday's post, Yami complimented me on the construction now used as today's title. She thought it was a "cleverly succinct" description of blogging (thanks, Yami!). She then went on to say, "Blogging as an eclectic and inclusive medium doesn't fit in such a [pre-existing, traditional] narrative, ergo the wider blogging field isn't considered newsworthy."

No, it doesn't. And that is really the point. Yes, the larger world of blogging is "overwhelming and trivial." In other words, it's like the rest of real life. Cf: Mimi Smartypants, on "The Small and the Big:"

I was reading a story in the latest Brain, Child that had a few paragraphs about how motherhood is a head-spinning combination of the Small and the Big. You are cleaning up poop and teaching someone how to talk. You are stuffing small arms into sleeves, filling sippy cups with diluted apple juice, pointing out the Big! Dog!, and also being responsible for another person's health, nutrition, and emotional well-being. I read that passage several times. In fact, I read that passage over and over and over.

It doesn't matter if you call it a "narrative," or a "category" or a "box." My beef with the major media is that they decide what is the Big, and in my opinion, they often get it wrong, wrong, wrong. My continued reference to the Washington Post's unnatural obsession with cicadas may be tired, but it's entirely on point. The Washington Post decided that the Brood X cicada story was big, Big, BIG. Therefore, they ran at least one cicada story every day during the cicada season (which was several weeks long). The sheer repetition of headlines about cicadas was enough to make you think that Something Was Wrong. Perhaps cicadas eat small children, steal your car, or cheat on their taxes? No. This particular brood just only comes every seventeen years. They don't bite, they don't sting, they don't even eat a lot. They were less of an inconvenience than the deer that eat my hostas. In other words, they were not of the Big. Yet the WaPo treated them as if they were the Biggest! Story! Ever!

A second example. My father is a pilot. For years, from the time I was a small child, people would ask me, "Don't you worry about your father getting into a plane crash?" (Yes, people say really stupid things to little kids sometimes.) These people saw plane crashes on the news and thought that my father had a very dangerous career. I finally learned to say, "If I were going to worry about him, I would do it while he's on the way to the airport. He's far more statistically likely to get into a car crash than a plane crash."

But car crashes occur every single day, so therefore are not newsworthy. I do understand that part of the lack of proportionality is what readers/viewers/listeners choose to filter, what their confirmation bias is, and how they get cranked up over things without thinking about them. But the news media does not help. Reporting on large-scale, relatively rare occurrences without providing context does not help. Focusing on the medium (the Internet) as if it causes rather than enables the crime (child pornography, financial scams, you name it) helps people to the idea that something neutral is in fact something Bad. Because such tactics work (all of those people, concerned with their own Small and Big issues don't always have the time or the resources to fact-check what should be a trusted source), we get news media that concern themselves with what will grab people's attention, not what will inform them. I am not looking for a list of the droning minutiae of the day - I am looking for some sense of proportion and context. Instead, I get the Small blown out of proportion and represented as a true example of the Big.

So, to bring it back to yesterday's example, blogs and blogging are full of more than partisan politics and tediously misspelt teenage self-exposure. There is literature, commentary, music, and humor. There are people out there worth reading and ideas out there worth hearing and debating. But these worthy things are so commonplace, they are obviously not worth a reporter's time.

Posted: Wednesday - September 29, 2004 at 07:55 AM | |