I take back what I said before about the internet community becoming less self-conscious, 'cause there's a hell of a lot of existential angst going on at nearly every blog I visit. The major issue seems to be the
purpose of blogs: do we bloggers have some kind of ethical code we should run our sites by? What should be valued in blogs? The unsurprisingly delightful
Oh Messy Life takes the pessimistic view that blogs are nothing more than a new psycho-capitalist construct: we're bartering our links, our witty comments and our cool technical-knowhow for reciprocal links of acknowlegement at other blogs. In other words, we're working our asses off to win brand loyalty.
Of course, I don't have a problem with this sort of practice. It's shallow, true, but the whole point of blogs, and anything on the internet, is that it doesn't just exist in a vacuum. I hate to get all intertextual on y'all, but surely a blog (and for that matter any personal representations on the net) is as much about the feedback provided by those reading it as simply the blogger's hard work alone. Anticipating that feedback is cynical, but so what? It's also cleverly preemptive and creatively stimulating. But again this is just my vaguely pro-capitalist bias speaking, and I can imagine Tom having something not so nice to say about anticipating feedback in general. But what do you think?