Narcississimo

Let's call it like it is: blogs and flickr and networking sites, the stuff of the already-boring term web 2.0, are pretty self-involved. You talk about yourself, you take pictures of you and your friends, you create exhaustive lists of things you like, you post it online, you sit around waiting to see if anyone comments on it and thereby validates your PG-13 exhibitionism.

Traditionally, the best of the blogosphere and its cousin-technologies are considered to be sites that index information and opinion from elsewhere or generate original content: people like Fosco and his LOLTheorists, Mike and his music criticism and pop theory, and K and her funny crazy online crap exposés. And I am down with these people, believe you me.

For the rest of us, who usually just post bite-sized memoirs and their equivalent, what I find interesting is the relative success or failure ratio. Examples:

• Kungfukitten posts almost exclusively about her own life and times. Thanks to her effervescent wit and skillful prose, it's almost always brilliant and funny and touching and totally worthwhile.
• The academia bloggers like the scourge of the bourgeoisie can mix up a frothy batch of personal anecdotes and larger concerns about the state of education and social justice and it totally works.
• Folks who are about posting funny crap and venting after bad days like Bahleedat are providing a valuable service in the context of my morning blog-reading and coffee-drinking routine. Which is to say, all day, every day.
  
• No Therapy is, I'm convinced, the most important writer of consequence currently living in an apartment in NYC, and her best work is on her blog. Check out today's entry.
  

My point: there's something to be said for the inherent narcissism of blogs. If you're lucky enough to know smart people, even when all they're doing is rambling about themselves, it's usually interesting and funny. The same goes for flickr and its equivalents; I am perfectly happy to look at self-portraits of my friends, so long as they take the time to make funny faces, wear rad clothes, or just look pretty.

So! While this is all obviously a big masturbatory gesture of self-justification, I'd like to think it's also a big masturbatory gesture of OTHER PEOPLE justification! Next up: a thrift-store sweater fashion show.