List fever seems to have overtaken the media this week, what with the Observer's 50 most powerful blogs* last Sunday, the Guardian's top seven poets (analysed here by Mr Footman), and now - oh, the irony! - the Independent weighs in with a 'hilarious' list of the 20 most boring Britons.
Clearly it's not just bloggers who like to resort to a nice list when there's space to fill.
Also, I thought that 'screaming drag-iosity' was something else entirely.
* Which managed to miss the point that it's the collective, collaborative nature of the blogosphere as a whole that creates its power, rather than it residing with any one individual blog...tsk, back to social media school for you, Observer...
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Re: footnote. Can I resuscitate my line about the blogosphere being a bit like The Borg? Well, I just did, so nerr.
Any and all references to the Borg are welcome here. Does that make Arianna Huffington the Borg Queen, though? If so I think we should stage an insurrection.
Of course if you cut a blog off from the Hive Mind - remove its links to other blogs, and so on - you get something that's not quite blog, not quite media. Like CiF.
[Shrugs] Well, I guess the news has been a bit listless lately...
The things I fear most are the memes.
Once tagged by one of the meme pack, you are into the grips of a vortex of successive posting instructions that you could spend all your life fulfilling.
I've got a long list of things I want to put on my various blogs and the name of the first person I kissed or the oldest person I've ever kissed (in a cupboard) isn't among them.
How can a 'dull' list include Delia? Didn't they see her when she grabbed the microphone on the pitch at Norwich a couple of years ago?
And Ruth Kelly? Nobody who makes me want to drive nails into my own eyes can be described as dull.
"A bit listless".
I'm still chuckling!
Ooo ooo ooo. Does that make things like Facebook, like, the Romulans or something?? I'm a bit scared of dipping my toe into this metaphor.
Crumbs, where have I been the past few days?
Rob: I thoroughly agree, the vast majority of memes are rubbish, especially that one where you have to go to page 123 of the book you're reading and write out the second sentence of the fifth paragraph or something. What on earth is the point of that?
Malc: Perhaps the Indy should remove Delia from the list and replace her with ITSELF, ooh get me.
Boz: You are right to be scared, for the metaphor does not stand up to close scrutiny. Although if anything, Facebook is *more* like the Borg, because it demands a lot of conformity (e.g. your name has to be 'real' and made up of a first name and a surname, how oppressive) and it doesn't allow its drones much in the way of genuine self-expression.
There's been a lot of debate as to whether the blogosphere actually *is* like a kind of hive mind, with the general consensus being that it isn't, because its individual nodes are eminently capable of independent thought and expression.
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