Virtually real, spectacularly virtual?

Last night I came upon Betsy Devine’s blog for the first time. It’s a great blog — very smart, lots of humour, too. (I also learned that she’s the mother of Amity (Nature is Profligate) Wilczek, whose blog really caught my imagination when it showed up on the Harvard weblogs. It’s rather fun to find 2 blogs I like and learn that they happen to be by a mother and daughter!) On April 30 Betsy Devine posted a link to a Jon Stewart (Daily Show) clip. Her comment: “You can see a 12.4 M version of the hilarious ‘Candidate Bush vs. President Bush’ foreign policy debate here. (Fortunately for the safety of our nation, Ashcroft has now removed candidate Bush to an undisclosed location, despite some treasonous whining by his lawyers.)” The clip seems to take forever to download, but wait for it and view it; it really is very funny. ************************* But even as I have found a new Betsy blog, I am unfortunately losing my old one. My friend Betsy Burke emailed today from Italy to say that she’s not going to continue keeping her blog after all. This means that I now don’t know anyone personally anymore who is blogging (except for my two children)…. Which makes this like a test for me: If you’re not a techie and not writing a technology-oriented blog, or you’re not sitting on some political fault-line that allows you to publish stuff that the mainstream press isn’t publicizing, what’s the point of an online journal if it’s as solitary as the old-fashioned kind? Can this virtual stuff be satisfying when you don’t actually know another single person who’s doing it, and you don’t even know if anyone is reading what you’re writing (…because you’re on an island in the Pacific and not at the Yahd, and all your “friends” in Massachusetts don’t bother to write you, the swine)? Is it in fact just an activity that lets you get off in some ill-defined way? (Dave Winer suggested somewhere it was a sex substitute for those not getting enough, but I can tell you it ain’t. So that still begs the question, what is it then?) What’s the C-factor in blogging (C for clique)? What’s the VIP-factor in blogging? Many comment boxes remain empty (mine in fact are always empty). Other comment boxes seem to be sporadically filled by friends’ comments, or else people have commented because perhaps the blogger appears to be a big mucka-muck and deserves to be taken seriously. Often a really important issue is raised, and appears to deserve a much bigger “talk-back” than a small comment. (Philip Greenspun has blogged about education a couple of times, which really touches a nerve with me because I have to homeschool two kids whose combined IQ points are about 400. Holy shit, wouldn’t I love to have a school that could work for them, and don’t I have a gazillion things to say about “school,” particularly as the first person of my generation in my family to finish high school, not to mention continue university or graduate studies, and as someone who suffered school’s insufferable boredom and inanity to the point of blotting out as much of it as possible. But in a comment box?) So what kind of “dialogue,” if any, is blogging? If it’s not a dialogue, why have the talk-back box? If it’s not a dialogue, what is it, other than a collective case of narcissism, which would explain why AOL wants to figure out how to cash in on it as the next killer app? And if blogging is going to be a phenomenon, isn’t it running mostly on the energy of the bloggers, versus the consumers (who are, however, being schooled in the protocols of narcissism)? Even though I enjoy reading Betsy Devine and Amity Wilczek, I won’t follow them obsessively. I’m as likely to read Maureen Dowd or Michele Landsberg on a regular basis. And since I don’t know any of these women personally, it again raises the question of whether blogs read regularly aren’t being read that way because the blogger has become “real” — integrated — to the reader in a personal way. And now we’re asking after realities and spectacles, virtual and otherwise. Make it dialogue, otherwise, what’s the point. There’s a cool book about the Society of the Spectacle that I absolutely need to reread….