Andrew Orlowski at The Register rants and rages against blogging in his “news” piece on William Gibson stopping his blogging efforts.
Gibson told Lillington that the daily confessional might ruin his creative process. He’s quite right to think so. He’s an artist, which means he collects and refines ideas over time, and has a gift for organizing his language to maximal effect. Put another way, he chooses his words carefully, and he chooses the contexts in which they will have most impact. (Optimizing compiler writers will understand what we mean – blabbing webloggers probably won’t).
I’m going to guess that Andrew has never actually worked his way through a compilers class, much less done any actual development in the field. I have, and I helped launch CNN Interactive, so lets just say that I know more about journalism than Andrew does about compilers and leave it at that, ‘kay?
Gibson also has great fun with signs, with semiotics, and the synthetic nature of reality – again, strangers to most webloggers, who favor the banality of consensus. As a writer, Gibson has no obligation to us to reveal his “processes” to us: but he might feel some obligation, we guess, as one of the treasures of the literary world, to continue delivering great novels. Or not. But having forsaken his “blog”, we feel much more confident he will be able to preserve his mind, and be in better shape to do so.
So blogs not only kill creativity, but also cause brain damage? (Hell, half the bloggers Andrew seems to lump together are more infatuated with semiotics and other things that make techies heads hurt than Gibson). Also is it just me, or does Andrew sound like some 1950’s Bible-belt preacher ranting and raving about how the “primitive jungle rhythms of rock and roll” were causing depravation among America’s youth?
All this only a day after Orlowski jumped all over blogging while writing a piece that failed to bother checking facts, getting second sources, or any of the other journalistic folderol that should be differentiating true journalism&tm; from blogging. Tim O’Reilly already took Andrew to task for that little bit of malfeasance, so I suppose I’m just dogpiling, but that’s what bloggers do, yes?
Funny that Orlowski mentioned “trivia-blogger cum blog-celeb” Cory Doctorow in his anti-Emerging Technology conference rant but managed to miss the fact that Cory’s celebrity probably comes from winning a John W. Campbell award for Best New SF writer a couple years ago, or that Cory just started a short story collaboration blog to open up his creative process to the public.
Why? Is it because Andrew has an agenda to advance (journalistic no-no), is sloppy (sadly common in “real journalism”), or is just a shitty journalist. Maybe the real problem is that the blogscape is so filled with smarmy commentary on the idiocy of the technology industry by people who are have technical chops that far exceed his own that The Register is having a hard time selling advertising?
Sad to see The Register swallowing the ultimate net-journalism cyanide capsule; talking shit about blogging in hopes of generating enough Google-juice to up their ad rates. You got it Andrew; I linked to your little diatribe, but it’ll be the last link to The Register from me.
