Behind the Times

The review we read for class struck me as an exercise in redundancy, a tired (but well-written) recap of Blogging and Internet culture 101. It's more of an explanation of how blogs distinguish themselves from print (hyperlinks, irreverence and neologisms, oh my!), and how they function in both the online and offline realm. As I read it, I thought it to be a mere reemphasis of Blood's already outdated weblog manual - perhaps obsolete in the blogger-savvy '08 craze, but informative in the scholastic analysis of the craft. Apparently the point was to recognize a largely ignorant demographic, a group of supposedly informed intellectuals who read The New York Review but fail to recognize the word "blog" as more than infantile jabberwocky. And so my painstaking scrutiny of the article fell by the wayside as Harrison's assignment in "ha ha" mockery invalidated its first half. Contemporaneously informative or not, Boxer found some very funny bytes of online humor, particularly this little number:

[A blogger called El Guapo] writes as a twenty-nine-year-old Guatemalan-American living in Washington, D.C., about such things as helping an oversexed friend shop for bulk condoms at Costco and fending off a gang of muggers with the phrase "Yo Quiero Taco Bell." I desperately wanted it to be memoir.

I'm sorry, but this is just hilarious.