Published: Aug 1, 2012 12:00:00 PM

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Do you read Gawker? I read Gawker. Lots of people read Gawker. I started by reading Kotaku and Gizmodo and Lifehacker, not even realizing they were all part of the same network, and then I stumbled upon Deadspin for sports-coverage and Gawker's main site itself for pop-culture minutia. There are a few other sites on Gawker's family of blogs too, with io9's TV recaps and Jezebel's gender politicking probably being the physically best-written stuff when the writers can keep themselves from being trashy on purpose and keep from tripping over their own snarking keyboards.

It's not the end of the world that so many written words are being read off of LCD screens instead of newsprint -- we aren't livig in a tactless, social-media hellscape, even if your basket-case uncle insists we are.

What's tough about these Gawker blogs, and the Internet Immediate-media in general, is that it favors speed over power at almost every opportunity. The phrase tl;dr (Too Long; Didn't Read) is commonplace in a post's comments-section. Because we want speed. Because that's how you corner the Snark-Market. Rather than permitting you to regress fully into glazed-face computer-gazing, it wakes your bored ass up! IT ANGRIES UP THE BLOOD! But because it it makes people blood-angry, it has become a great and rare thing when you can read to the end of an thoroughly-thoughtful and opinionated blog post without developing a raging troll-on, and contempt for other readers' comments, and a desire to mule-kick their disagreeable Twitter handles so hard they kiss the moon.

People come to Internet news sites for the circus, and I don't blame them, it's a helluva thing. The Romans invented the circus, and they maximized its advantages -- the Romans also invented Calligula though, and that's where the waters get murky. Technically, The News is The Same no matter where you get it from. So if The Event happens and if it is to be reported, why not get it painted with a splash of Crayola's® Unemployed Orange (or semi-employed, you guys. They've got ad-revenue. C'mon.). Better to get world-, or Brooklyn- (same diff), events reported quickly, and in a tone you can identify with, and not at 6pm over a cathode-tube TV from a man in a rayon suit he bought at Idlewild Airport back when that was a thing and a place -- because he's old.

Thousands of people a day elect to hit up these sites for news, opinion, and talk-back, and why not? For example, except for those physically in London right now, you will be getting the stories about these Olympic events from a middleman, so why not have that middleman be an irked angry-something in front of a computer screen? There's less of a chance of corporate filtering, isn't there? Then again, it doesn't take a professional blogger to tell you how moronic NBC's stance on tape-delaying these events is. The articles are written with such vitriol for the lowest common denominator that it must be the best approach.

So why not? Because of the snark-bubble. We're heading for a burst of fatigue. No matter how loud the blogosphere's written words may be, they haven't stopped NBC's draconian coverage and sinking-Titanic business-model, they haven't stopped the economy from Bambi-wobbling through a boiling-hot summer, and they haven't turned the country against the bigots at Chik-Fil-A. Again, it's tiring. We have to keep living in the world. We don't get to use "summer" as a verb like the Granthams or the Romneys. We've been eating our own tails for so long that we are growing into a very tired Ouroboros with a very sore jaw and chewed-up rear-ends and weariness from opinionated self-promotion and validation. News is uncool. News is something that Cronkite and our grandparents did. Ideologically, it was an old man's game. Now, it is not. It's a lit-major's game. It's a geek's game. It's a viper-pit. The content, The News remains the same -- it's The Story Of Today, same as it ever was.

Well, you know what? Today kinda fucking sucked from where we're standing. From where we're standing there are people with money trying to bend The Story Of Today into a reality-TV segment instead of something that happened. So we mock the craft, and Aaron Sorkin can suck a chode. We mock The News, just as Jon Stewart taught us. We hit with contempt and snark and our rolled-up English BA's because fuck the Chicago Style Manual. But we are still growing oh-so-tired, and we're considering passing over a controlling-share in the Internet-culture to the more agile and less-focused.

It's been a long time and it takes a lot of energy to make anger artful, even with a righteous command of the English language and a polite dislike of celebrities. Soon, there won't be enough free brain cells to run around and make trouble like we do. The blog will become too slow, a lumber dinosaur devoured by micro-blogs, and news feeds, and, I dunno, Compys. Its metered snark-cum-news will not be satisfactory for the hungry, and growing -- mom's getting an iPad -- audience. The vessel for our anxiety will prove insufficient, the snark-bubble will burst, and news will pupate into a crawling rumor-wall full of batshit-loco ravings. Because there isn't time to read between the lines, hell, there might not be time for lines, plural. Look at how many scrolling feeds any news network has. They already want to be your Twitter feed, they just haven't figured out how to yet.

All because the snark-market collapsed. And our platform will be bought out from under us, either to be destroyed or ladened with sponsorship from chicken restaurants. But what if it didn't have to? What if cooler heads prevailed? Instead of collapsing, what if it was re-engineered. It might happen -- it's already happened in the middle-eastern revolutions these last few years. We might be the heirs to this country, but we certainly aren't the heirs to the Internet or the culture therein -- we are still in the act of inventing the fucking thing. The young are crafting style, taboo, faux-paux, and etiquette for the medium, so, what if the wise out-witted the angry? What if we used the ability to broadcast to a wide audience with actual good intentions in our hearts? What if we cared to learn from what we read, and what we saw, and we were brave, and didn't ignore how unhappy and passive-aggressive a lot netizens are, and we undid these preconceived notions about what is truly worth writing about, and we became a population and a civilization and not a million roaring micro-crowds of one?

I think that would be good.

-- @Alex Crumb (originally published 8/1/12)

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