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| Saturday, April 22, 2006 |
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(Not quite) never on Sunday 
| | For some reason my blog won't go to Sunday. Until it does, I'll post here, yesterday. |
Subtext: beyond marketing
Land of the fried, home of the depraved
| | Disinhibition Nation, by Daniel Henninger, deputy eiditor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, has the subhead When blogs rule, we'll all talk like ----. Set off by Kevin Ray Underwood, the repressed Oklahoma Carls Jr. worker and blogger with a taste for chopped-up children, Henninger huffs, |
| | I don't think the blogosphere is breeding cannibals. But it looks to me as if the world of blogs may be filling up with people who for the previous 200 millennia of human existence kept their weird thoughts more or less to themselves. Now, they don't have to. They've got the Web. Now they can share. |
| | Subtext: That untamed hoi polloi, those unwashed minds polluting the discourse, that rabble on the verge of violence -- they are at the ramparts! Isn't there some way to mow them down with grapeshot? |
| | Henninger is nostalgic for inhibition: |
| | In our time, it has generally been thought bad and unhealthy to "repress" inhibitions. Spend a few days inside the new world of personal blogs, however, and one might want to revisit the repression issue. |
| | The human species has spent several hundred thousand years sorting through which emotions and marginal neuroses to keep under control and which to release. Now, with a keyboard, people overnight are "free" to unburden and unhinge themselves continuously and exponentially. One researcher quotes the entry-page of a teenage girl's blog: "You are now entering my world. My pain. My mind. My thoughts. My emotions. Enter with caution and an open mind." |
| | The power of the Web is obvious and undeniable. We diminish it at our peril. But what if the most potent social effect to spread outward from the Internet turns out to be disinhibition, the breaking down of personal restraints and the endless elevation of oneself? It may be already. |
| | Disinhibited vocabulary is now the normal way people talk on cable TV, such as on "The Sopranos" or in stand-up comedy. On the Web and on the street, more people than not talk like this now. What once was isolated is covering everything. No wonder the major non-cable networks are suing to overturn the FCC's decency rulings; they, too, want the full benefits of normalized disinhibition. Hip-hop, currently our most popular music form, is a well-defined world of disinhibition. |
| | Then there's politics. On the Huffington Post yesterday, there were more than 600 "comments" on Karl Rove and the White House staff shake-up. "Demoted my --- the snake is still in the grass." "He should be demoted to Leavenworth." "Rove is Bush's Brain, and without him, our Decider-in-Chief wouldn't know how to wipe his own ----." |
| | No examples from the right, of course, where comments in rough agreement with the WSJ's leanings are no less inhibited. As Greyhawk in The Mudville Gazette puts it, Henninger offers very little to counter his implied point that cannibals and left-wing screamers are typical of the blogosphere. Obviously he hopes his audience is still unfamiliar with the medium. |
| | To be fair, Henninger is referring primarily to personal¹ bloggers. However, one wonders what his point is in bringing up the Internet¹s latest blogging cannibal. Would the world be better if child-murderers like Kevin Ray Underwood would refrain from sharing their weird thoughts with the world and simply stuck to practicing their ghastly, self-chosen vocation? |
| | We think that Mr. Henninger may have things backwards: the lack of self-restraint has always been there. It was simply expressed by — and happening to — the type of people with which mainstream types like Mr. Henninger aren¹t acquainted: a world in which no one he knows is a victim of monsters like Underwood. Welcome to the nuthouse, Mr. Henninger. |
| | i know this guy was one on a million, that there arent that many people who dont get touched and then snap and kill and then try to eat people, but we need to lower the odds of this shit happening again. its just too painful. |
| | I've always believed that a more reasonable comparison for modern bloggers are the old hand-printed broadsheets that once were a staple of American political life. They were partisan, nasty, occasionally unhinged and definitely inflammatory. But they stripped bare the cossetted worlds of politicians and priestly presses alike. The broadsheets faded over time, becoming either extinct or mutating into more "professional" productions. Blogs may and probably will do the same. Until then, relax, Dan. The world is not coming to an end. But it is changing faster than you know. |
| | Right. I'm already nostalgic for the time when the only place you could find creepy stuff like this was on television, and all the perpetrators were TV viewers. |
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