The Blogosphere is Sort of Raping You

But I began to feel the limits of the brand that I had created for myself. They were oppressing me. For this and other reasons (travel, depression, low self-esteem, relationship problems, etc) I began to promote myself and my website less frequently. I participated in the network less and I began avoiding emails and only using Gmail chat under the Invisible setting. I found myself fearful of StatCounter. In general, it seemed as if my faith in the Internet being something that I liked had waned.

Then I found Gawker. I had known about Gawker for a long time but I had never been interested. I do not know why it interested me, but in this phase I was unexpectedly overcome with a fixation on the website and I spent hours reading it while perceiving myself delighted. Then I found the rest of these kinds of websites – Huffington Post, The Awl, Salon.com, etc.

And I realized that this was actually The Blogosphere, and that I was able to take seriously the idea of certain webpages acting as cultural, long-standing institutions that could be said to have the power to influence taste and control minds. I understood the bigger picture of a certain realm of the internet and I additionally realized that I was about 5 years late coming to this understanding. That I had been sincerely ‘out of the loop’ for a long time.

I continued to enjoy reading the content these websites offered. But as time passed I began feel interested in the way these websites commanded so much attention and traffic. I began to feel that discussion and popularity were being created by these websites. That they fed Twitter and Blogger and Facebook users with things about which to voice opinions in a circular pattern that only expanded.

It was in this way that The Blogosphere lost its mystique for me, and I began to view every new piece of information as one male or female’s attempt to drive traffic to the blog he or she wrote for. I saw that their strategy was to incessantly exploit celebrities and humans’ inherent interest in seeing their rise and demise. To cover current events under the wider editorial tone of “open-minded-left-wing-upper-twenties-to-mid-thirties-office-tech-savvy.” To drive traffic with scandal and boobs. Terrible murders, political idiocy.