The Times: So Bleh
The Times has discovered that bloggers wrote a lot about Kaavya Viswanathan.
In the age of the Internet, literary exegesis (whether driven by scandal or not) is no longer undertaken solely by pale critics or plodding lawyers speaking only to each other, but by a global hive, humming everywhere at once, and linked to the wiki. And if you are big enough to matter (as any writer would hope to be), one misstep, one mistake, can incite a horde of analysts, each with a global publishing medium in the living room and, it sometimes seems, limitless amounts of time.
Frontier justice? Mob rule? Perhaps.
To which I say, "linked to the wiki"? I have no idea what that means—be honest, do you?—but it sounds kind of kinky.
(Wiki, related to wikipedia, of course, means "a collaborative Web site set up to allow user editing and adding of content," but have you ever, ever heard anyone use the term? "Linked to the wiki"—that is too funny.)
Can we please stop with all these stories about how amazing it is that current events get discussed on blogs? This is not news anymore, and the articles have a gee-whiz quality that just makes the Times look silly and out-of-touch. "Frontier justice"? Please. Just consider how the reporting in these pieces is done: Google "Kaavya Viswanathan" and sample some of the results.
If a blog breaks news—
as The Smoking Gun did with James Frey—that's one thing. But I think we've passed the cultural moment in which the Times must remark upon the fact that blogs exist and that people talk about stuff on them.
