‘If you want people to naively see the internet as ‘just another medium through which to meet people and exchange ideas’, you will wait a very long time.

…

er… isn’t it that already? (along with some other things)…

Sigh… I noted also her Facebook comments.

What? Why?

If you want to target her for her choice of not reading blogs, fine. How is not being on Facebook – not being a mindless customer of a sterile, corporatized social product – comparable to isolating oneself and one’s knowledge by not reading books? Should I deride you for not being part of the community of people who drink Diet Pepsi?

Let her choose not to use it and gain from it, and be done with it. If you want people to naively see the internet as ‘just another medium through which to meet people and exchange ideas’, you will wait a very long time.

“I have no Facebook friends. I want no Facebook friends. I have no online community… I do not care to read blogs…,” she says, proudly. Are we to applaud her rebellion? Well bully for her. It’s as ludicrous as like someone proudly proclaiming “I don’t read books, I will never read books.”

It is this incessant, ignorant and tiresome lament that the internet is a Bad Place where people are “forced” to updated their ‘Book statuses and can only have half-real online romances. The internet is there as a grand resource. *You* choose how you wish to use it and gain from it. I wish people would just see it as yet another medium through which to meet people and exchange ideas, as humans are normally wont to do. And yes, those would be *real* people and *real ideas.

re: winning on skewed terms, i think her terms are an admission of defeat – or at least fear of defeat. if all “blogs” are drivel not worth reading, then geography shouldn’t matter one bit. if all blogs are *not* drivel, then I win, and blatchford’s decision not to read them has nothing to do with quality, but rather with some other thing that only blatchford knows.

this is a waste of energy tho, I know … I remember getting all worked up about a librarian who sent me an email to LibriVox telling me to take down links to wikipedia because they were “bad for students.” i got in a long debate with her, and boris said, “forget about those people. they’ve lost. why bother?”

Though, if I wrote a letter to Blatchford every time she pissed me off, I wouldn’t have any time left to blog.

I think you might still have won the challenge even on her skewed terms. Writers like Malcolm Gladwell (not from Toronto, but Kingston – I’m sure all her “writers” weren’t raised in the Annex either) have excellent blogs you could have used as fodder.

One of the most dramatic things blogs have done, is to allow me to read opinions of a cross-section of intelligent Canadians – instead of forcing me to read the minority opinion of war-mongers like Blatchford every week.