Blogging is about to crash. This article in the New York Times indicates to me that it is peaking. It has that feel of a superfad like feng shui that gets all hot and captures the popular imagination briefly and then is featured in some New Yorker cartoons or on Saturday Night Live of and then crashes. It takes an inspired person to stick with a fad after it has been featured on Saturday Night Live. I will stick around while blogs get maligned, pushed off of search engines, and ridiculed.
A new theme of mine: ideas that have had their day, were analyzed and dismissed by the world, but tick away anyway and maybe even grow in spite of the dismissal. We need a term to collectively describe these fads. If you announced five years ago that you were going to be a Feng Shui practitioner, you would have spent time explaining what it was, and then people would think you had some kind of insight into the way of the universe. Then, a couple of years ago, it peaked and everyone was talking about it. Today, you announce the same thing and people have had all the jokes and stuff pounded into their brains already and they are trained to laugh at you. Feng Shui is post fame. It is over but it is not over. Blogging is about to be the same thing. I think blogging is wide open to ridicule. What a ridiculous vanity to think you have something to say! I say bring it on. Let the popularity wear off. What is left will be of a higher quality.
Take co-counseling for example. Anti-cult web sites and psychiatrists have been warning against this movement for years. Its leader was accused sex crimes, former practitioners have come out against it. Yet, still, there is a hard core of practitioners that swear by it. It’s kooky. It’s easy to ridicule, yet on it goes.
I think I am really writing about the balkanization of our culture. There are vegetarians and co-counselors and feng shui practitioners and bloggers and the mainstream becomes irrelevant to more and more people. And the more oppressive and all powerful the mainstream seems, the more brittle it becomes. Every paradigm contains the seeds of its own destruction. Ever since I have been around, the mainstream has been so stultifying that it drives people to the fringes.
Example: I remember my mom returning home after dropping my brother off at a Grateful Dead concert in Hartford. Her eyes were wide: " I didn't know there were so many hippies left on the earth" That is exactly what I mean. In her mind, hippies had vanished from the earth, yet, despite all the ridicule in Mad Magazine, despite all the stereotyping and outright hatred heaped upon hippies, here they are storming the streets of Hartford by the tens of thousands, if only to boggle the mind of Ellen McGuire.
11:44:37 PM 
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