Kitty Power

Fed Up

A phenomenon I know well from school is when the level playing field you've naively convinced yourself that everyone is playing on is revealed to be a sham. That realization comes usually after a random conversation in which people reveal exactly what their parents do for a living. It's always the most hardcore anti-capitalists who are the offspring of someone big time. It was always funny how they could be semi-ashamed yet blasé about it at the same time.

"Yeah, my mom's a district court judge" "My dad's a nuclear physicist." "My mom's a diplomat." "My mom's a museum curator." "My dad's a professor and social theorist."

"Umm...my dad's a printer and my mom works for the court." "Is she like a lawyer?" "No." In my senior year of high school, a group of us were sitting around talking about our parents' jobs for a moment in the context of financial aid for school and all that and I have to admit I felt relieved when everyone else had parents with "regular" jobs. But, this one girl said that her father told her not to tell people that he was "just a mailman because everyone else's parents had all those fancy jobs." I gave a flip response at the time: "That's ridiculous. It'd make more sense not to tell people now because everyone might be hitting you up for a postmark."

As the news has jumped on the blogging bandwagon, there has been a steady stream of fawning press anointing certain bloggers as media royalty. "They're so snarky!" "They're so urbane!" "The second coming of Dorothy Parker and her circle!" I mean, that's cool, because when I say I have a blog now that means people have half a clue of what I mean and might even think I say something witty and intelligent on a semi-regular basis. But, it's kicked up the consolidation of "those that matter" and the rest of the plebs up exponentially. Someone compared the whole thing to the formation of a high school clique. That's a natural metaphor to make because there are few things in NYC that aren't designated by cliques. The young and hip in the city are drawn together in loose formations due to jobs, pedigrees, degrees/alma maters, and interests, as well as proximity to those "cool" places and things. Cliques are by nature insular and exclusive, dominating their surrounding spheres. At first, I found it interesting to read some blogs and see links to other blogs of similar nature and as I read, get clued in to inside jokes and the like, but lately it's over the top. Parties described as virtual who's who of who's in with so many links back and forth that they might as well just have a fucking group blog and give it a rest. The general social/media world snark even lost some of its bite when it was revealed that they were about as insider as it could get.

But, what really pissed me off was yesterday's post on Gothamist about blogging rules. Now, I love Gothamist. It's a fantastic read, filled with interesting NYC specific roundups and an amusing attachment to Law and Order, food, and panda bears, but fuck them. Who died and made them the blog police? It would be bad enough if they just put that out there and it was whatever, but the subsequent comments chiming in "you guys are so right! *ass kiss, ass kiss*" really made me sick. Especially since most of them came from their freaking cronies anyways. The supposedly wonderful thing about the internet is that any old person theoretically can have a blog and talk about anything they want -- as profound or inane as that might be. But, it's becoming more and more obvious all the time that the web is just as liable to monopolization by a select group of gatekeepers as any other segment of society. I couldn't give a fuck about what they feel a good blog should do, i.e. to be like them. Variety is the spice of life and last time I checked, there are millions of other blogs operating outside their zone that would suffer to follow those methods. Isn't it wonderful that I can agree to disagree all I want and the world won't stop moving?

Thus concludes the rant brought about just because I felt like it.

Posted by Candicissima at December 9, 2003 04:50 PM