No one will read this story.
Last week, Jericho Scott was the talk of the blogosphere. This week, he’s just another 10-year-old. In between, nothing much changed—except that a fresher piece of marginalia flashed across the front page of Google News, and we promptly forgot that we’d ever cared about Jericho in the first place.
No one will read this story.
And that’s precisely the problem.
I won’t pretend to have even a passing interest in the bylaws of the Liga Juvenil de Baseball of New Haven, CT. I don’t know how I’d rule, if the decision were mine to make; I don’t know whether the Battle of Jericho really does typify America’s inclination to coddle its kids. I do know, though, that it’s supremely ironic for a flock of Web-addicted adults with the collective attention span of a Tourette’s-stricken Tee-Baller to lecture anyone about physical or intellectual softness. I also know that irony is all too often a symptom of disease.
Self-empowerment is healthy.
Self-indulgence is not.
Unfortunately, your laptop doesn’t come with a filter to help you tell one from the other.
It would be silly to blame the Internet here. Technology is only ever a tool, a thing whose value depends on its use, and its users. We blog as we are. If the results are petty and pathological, we have no one to blame but ourselves, or whomever it was that made us what we’ve become.
It feels good to be right.
It feels better to be righteous.
In the 21st century, there’s a fine line between speaking your mind and just plain stroking your ego.
Pompous indignation is a dangerous drug. It starts with a casual rant atop a soapbox. Then a pastime becomes a habit, and a habit becomes a need. Pretty soon you’re typing fervidly into the void at three in the morning, desperate to tell a bunch of invisible strangers who live in a box about your own harrowing Little League experiences, and how they prepared you for life in a world where you’ve always got to play with the big kids before you’re ready—and where nobody cares except a bunch of invisible strangers who live in a box, who at least do you the courtesy of always being there to listen.
Too much time in cyberspace will leave a man feeling awful hollow, Bubba:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but easy-to-use publishing software.
Because between the blogger and the blogged falls the Shadow.
And you're liable to lose more than just your voice if you get all your kicks from only just saying, is all...
4 Comments
Loading more comments...
This comment and all replies have been deleted This comment has been deleted Undo delete