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Hate Your Local Blogger, It's The Hip Thing To Do

Blogger backlash is emerging as the hot trend for early 2007. Texas and Tennessee both have anti-blogger initiatives in their state legislatures. But red state populists aren't the only ones out to get those pesky bloggers.

Blogger backlash also may be the next 'in' thing with intellectuals, too. Media theorist Geert Lovink has come out against blogs, claiming they lead to decay and even nihilism:

Bloggers are nihilists because they are "good for nothing". They post into Nirvana and have turned their futility into a productive force. They are the nothingists who celebrate the death of the centralized meaning structures and ignore the accusation that they would only produce noise. They are disillusionists whose conduct and opinions are regarded worthless.

First off, I appreciate the irony that Lovink is coming out against blogging with his own blog. As he said, "Web services like blogs cannot be separated from the output they generate." So, why publish a blog, Geert, if the medium is so corrupt?

I have to say I don't see much in this critique that's all that new. Critics said very similar things about other new media back in the day. People have long accused TV of turning people into apathetic couch potatoes and we all know what ministers, small-town civic leaders, and communist apparatchicks thought about rock 'n' roll in its heyday.

This critique strikes me as a lot of intellectual polish for good old-fashioned fuddy duddyism. What do you think? Are bloggers just agents of nihilism destroying values or are we advancing a new era of citizen journalism and media equality?

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