Celebtation of the blogging culture: Ode to the Void (2017) Kyle Paoletta.
“No Brexit, no global refugee crisis, no opioid epidemic. The incensed and concerned seem to have mostly migrated to the social internet where the audiences for their opining are readymade. But blogs of olde are telling of a deeper seclusion from the 24-hour news cycle that the internet also allows.”
“The buzz of a notification in your pocket is seductive, but its extended absence can provoke alarm. To live on social media is to forever risk the void.”
“All news is fake, now. The Muslim ban is an abomination, but any coverage that labels it as such, to a bigot, serves only to certify the coherence of a worldview.”
“The cool users, the savvy ones, the ones who can vet an article’s accuracy based on the quantity of white space in its layout, are just waking up to the fact that the whole time they’ve been standing on the edge of a cliff.”
“As long as a story gets likes or generates follows, its objective truth comes second to its ability to codify whatever the reader expects to be reading.”
“The compulsion to blog, despite the overwhelming indifference of the internet writ large, is not new. […] It’s in those moments, more than during any Periscope stream or exchange of Snapchats, that the promise of the internet seems closest: watching and admiring another person’s brain, functioning privately.”