I can see the blog-hater is a phenomenon that isn’t going away. Much to the blog-haters’ chagrin, the same could be said of the blog itself; I suppose every action has an equal and opposite reaction. And so we have two activities now which were mostly unknown to us less than a decade ago. Blogging, and hating those who do it.

I don’t need to have blogging explained to me, since I’m one of those who do it. The blog-haters are more of an enigma. I have never understood them. I see them on par with those who hate tapioca pudding…and say so while eating it. Um, no, something more strange than that. Saying you hate tapioca pudding, while eating tapioca pudding, demanding seconds when the dish is empty, and then claiming someone is force-feeding it to you.

No, wait. That doesn’t quite capture it. Doing all of the above…while following people around, spoon in hand, as they try to get away from you, because you’re tedious, because you’re spraying them with tapioca pudding spittle, or both — to continue with your screed about how much you hate tapioca pudding. Capturing that captive audience, against their will, to drone on about you yourself being a captive audience to something else, when you’re really not. It’s hypocrisy, but not really — rather an insult to hypocrites to call the blog-haters hypocrites. Hypocrites are supposed to point out traits others have, that they themselves share. Blog-haters point out traits in blogs, that the blogs do not have, that they themselves do have: The impulse to make themselves heard and read by those who have no wish to partake. It’s a form of psychological projection.

There is something anti-technology about the blog-hater. Blogs, I would hasten to add, generally have very little to do with technology in substance, but are tightly connected in spirit. Blanket statements fit the blog world rather poorly, but one thing a lot of the blogs have in common is a sense of purpose that has to do with noticing things. A post may simply provide a link to something else, either a news story or another blog, and the writing that surrounds the link will be something of the flavor of “get a load of this!” It may be critical or it may be supportive, but the common theme is to preserve the link for posterity along with the author’s sentiments about it. On a more primitive level, maybe the link will be entirely absent and the post will be a simple “Andy Rooney” type essay, along the lines of “D’jever notice?” Like…”D’jever notice that no matter what I enter in Google, the results always have to do with porn?”

I can’t prove it, but I think it’s a fair statement that we don’t have any technology that got started any other way. Cell phones, computers, cars, handrails, fire…some guy noticed something. The blog-haters may be willing to concede the point, or they may not; it doesn’t matter. This is the essence of making life better.

But that’s not really the point I want to make. The point I want to make, is that it’s harmless. And furthermore, I can’t help noticing — like the tapioca pudding, the noticing-of-things does nothing to irritate people, unless they choose to make it that way. And that’s where my special-interest lies. The practical exercise of good manners, I have found, all boils down to one cardinal rule: Don’t be a jerk. With that in mind, I’ve been learning what I can about people who hate blogs. They’re irritated by something I do, after all, and I have no wish to go out of my way to irritate people. The paramount question at hand, therefore, comes down to this: Is there a way to avoid irritating them?

And I’ve come to the conclusion that there really isn’t. Blogging or not.

This is partly just common sense. The guy who eats tapioca pudding even though he says he hates it, has a desire to be “happy” the same way Hillary Clinton might desire a loyal spouse: The desire portrayed is a complete falsehood, or else it is ineffectual because it is directly contradicted by something hidden and stronger. Which one of those is the truth, nobody really cares. That question is irrelevant. And by that, I mean completely.

So people who hate blogs, whatever they pretend to be, are not people who desire things to be done according to their articulated wishes. They can easily have what they say they want.

Now, this George F. Will character — you’ve heard of him, right? — he’s a strange duck. On ABC’s This Week, Will commented that blogging is “about narcissism”:

So much of what is done on the web is people getting on there and writing their diaries as though everyone ought to care about everyone’s inner turmoils. I mean, it’s extraordinary.

It would be easier to make sense of this, if George Will wasn’t appearing on This Week to say it. Sunday morning “Having Coffee With…” shows like this, offer a great benefit to lots of people — the folks who watch them, being the very last among those. They’re kind of like multi-level marketing: Those already participating are the real beneficiaries, and those invited to participate, are only being led to believe they can benefit. Sunday-morning news shows are all about self-promotion, long before they are ever about news. Here’s George Will, appearing on such a show, bellyaching away about self-promotion on the innernets without a hint of irony.

Out of fairness to him, we should keep in mind what he did not say. He didn’t extend this criticism to all blogs, and it appears he has a specific target in mind for what he’s describing. Touchy-feely blogs, I gather. “Today my Mom made me clean my room. What a drag!” But even with that kept in mind, and extending to Will the benefit of any possible doubt, his criticism is just silly. What he’s criticizing, is the keeping of a diary. Is he criticizing all diaries that have ever been kept? Or is he criticizing the practice of keeping it online instead of in a drawer? Silly either way.

But it’s the lack of self-awareness, the lack of irony, that really makes his comment fascinating. And this is the one attribute Will shares with other blog-haters. As I become more and more aware of this rapidly-spreading counter-culture and review the self-promoting work of those who hate blogs, I’m impressed by how much I can read without gathering so much as a glimmber of recognition that these people are doing the very thing they claim to hate — and going way, way out of their way to get ‘er done. Nearly all of them, are completely lacking in this sense of irony.

This guy over here does have some sense of irony. I mean, if you are so generous as to count desperate denial tactics (see Appendix B) as “a sense of irony.”

There’s one other thing I notice about people who hate blogs: The sense of urgency is palpable. They desperately want bloggers to stop blogging, for some reason. If they could bring blogging to an end this coming Monday, that would be good, but I get the sense if it were to stop on Saturday that would be even better. It’s time-sensitive, and that’s a little weird. That’s not the way I hate country music, baggy pants, Alyssa Milano’s short hair, and rodent-sized dogs. Those are personal habits other people have, that don’t directly impact me; habits that bely differences between their personalities and tastes, and my own. I don’t relate to them, but I can live amongst them for as long as I’m given cause to do so, without cost. This is not the way blog-haters hate blogs. Blog-haters hate blogs about the same way I hate extra-long pretentious coffee orders at Starbuck’s from someone in line in front of me. Or people greeting me with “Guten Morgen Morgan” like it’s the first time in forty years I’ve heard that. Or fellow motorists talking on clamshell-type cell phones pressed up against their left ears.

Those are “If I never see it again, it’ll be too soon” type irritants — active irritants. Blog-haters, with surprising uniformity, place blogs in this category. I don’t know why they do that, but they do.

What to do with that information, I’m really not sure. Somehow, we should find a way to get these people to stop reading blogs. I don’t know how to do that. The ones who present themselves to me, aren’t rational people. In my case, they target some guy who calls his blog “The Blog That Nobody Reads,” and accuse me of forcing people to read it. Now, that’s just nuts.

Update 12/21/06: I see the Sacramento Bee is eyeballing this post for possible inclusion in the Sunday paper, so I’ve cleaned up the language. I’m such a potty-mouth.

By sheer coincidence, the Assistant Editorial Features Editor at the Wall Street Journal has thrown in his own two cents on why bloggers get way more attention than they deserve. You can read it here. His argument comes down to this: an “apples and oranges” comparison. He’s in great company here. What he’s saying, if I can paraphrase, is that most blogs are full of substandard, lackluster, stupid crap, and they don’t put an impressive amount of effort into trying to be anything but that. “We rarely encounter sustained or systematic blog thought,” says he. “Instead, panics and manias; endless rehearsings of arguments put forward elsewhere; and a tendency to substitute ideology for cognition.” And I agree with that.

But his conclusion is wrong because 1) blogs have offered us a substantial benefit that has very little to do with the “average” blog. I think even the most rabid blog-basher would admit that to round up, say, a million blog postings selected at random, sort them by quality of thinking, grammar, whatever passes for “social responsibility” etc. etc. etc. and then scoop up #500,001, would be a very unfair measurement of how the “blogosphere” as a whole can benefit those who peruse it. Nor would the most exuberant blog-defender think, for even a second, of using such a test to support his defense of blogs. Seen as one large blog-pile, blogs correlate to an enormous mountain of dirt clods and donkey doots, that on any given day might have a gold nugget or two. So you see, what the mean or median blog does, has not a thing to do with anything. It’s the consumer’s chosen method of combing through that hill that is far more meaningful.

That’s one thing. And 2) …each statement in the paragraph above, applies in substance as well as in form, to newspapers. Not only to those, but to all other vehicles we have for educating ourselves about current events. No clear-headed observer, regardless of their biases, would assert anything different. Nine newspapers run crap…one newspaper runs something good…you wouldn’t bash the printed media industry as a whole for the crap, even if there happens to be so much more of it. How come that’s a fair test for blogs? That’s where the apples-and-oranges comes in.

And then there’s more criticism for Mr. Rago’s editorial that, while irrelevant as a test of his thesis and perhaps a little unfair, nevertheless leaves behind a big ol’ shiner on the face of his argument just because of his selected complaints. Simply put, when you make a point of bashing someone for their literary qualities and journalistic standards, or lack thereof…you should get your punctuation right. You really should, otherwise it does a lot of damage to the point you’re trying to make. You’re left back at the apples-and-oranges thing, insisting that tests and standards be applied to the objects of your criticism, while you yourself are somehow allowed to escape them. Not very convincing.

More on the snotty, pretentious blogger here; just in time for the season, it’s The Blog Before Christmas.

‘Twas the blog before Christmas, and here in my house,
I was tapping my keyboard, and clicking my mouse.
My ads were all placed on my pages with care,
In hopes that my visitors would click on them there.
My husband was pouting alone in our bed,
While visions of a blogless wife danced in his head.
But at my computer, with a cup of French Roast,
I’d just begun writing another blog post…