Subscribe to the BrittonBritton newsletter! | Tell a friend about this page.

www.bullshit.com

Claes Britton | Jan 9, 2008 | 1 comments

Assholes of the world, unite!


So someone somewhat irreverently phrased him/herself when on the subject of this very media, that infamous Worldwide Web, back in the days of swelling dotcom bubble of the late nineties, when so many others were reliogiously prasing this wondrous new media and all its magic possibilities in every imaginable key and mode (I’ve written about those uniquely bizarre times in Future.nerd, my own personal favorite chapter in my book Turn of the Century in Stockholm).


Well, a decade later I guess we can sum up how the prelude of it all turned out, and you couldn’t call it a particularly uplifting story.


My old and dear friend Tyler Brulé, to whom I seem to return almost compulsively, appeared on CNN the other night, together with an author whose name escaped me. The duo discussed an issue which just keeps getting more urgent, not to say acute — the accellerating globalized stupidity, amateurism, vulgarity and bullshit that keeps flushing over us all through that WWW, also flooding all ”traditional” media in the process.


I’m referring of course to the notorious ”blogosphere”, this entity through which amateurs and dilettantes keep stealing away market share from professionals at an ever increasing pace, resulting in galloping newspaper death (particularly in the U.S.), general decline of quality across the line and other evils. As we know, newspapers, magazines, television and other media are responding to this competition by lowering themselves to the levels of the blogosphere, unleashing all manner of gossip, amateurism and free-flowing opinionating, resulting in nothing but further accelleration of their own downfall. We need only consider the monstrous success of TV-shows such as ”Idol”, ”Top Model” and various ”reality” shows, as well as the overall degeneration of daily newspapers and magazines. Another highly irritating phenomena which Tyler and the author, I think rightly, attributed to influence from the internet is the now mandatory custom af always asking ”the man in the street” of his/her opinion on everything from the risk of war on Iran to the death of songbirds in rush hour traffic. Who the hell gives a shit? Tyler and the author pledged for the return of elitism, expertise and quality in media. The author, who’d studied the blogosphere extensively, said: ”blogs have provided little else but huge amounts of loudmouthed, untalented and above all boring banalitity, stupidity and hostility”.


I can only second these emotions and thank my good grace that I, and no other, just happen to be a most rare exception from these truths...

 

”In the olden days, if you didn’t get it right, you got killed. Now you only rik losing the competition. It’s like everything that’s modernized — it loses quality”
-Takayoshi Nagamine, Master of the Eight Dan at Shorinryo, Japan’s oldest karate dojo on the island of Okinawa (from ”Okinawa, mon amour” in Stockholm New No. 11 – the Tokyo issue).

Comments

blog comments powered by Disqus

Recent blog entries