WSJ on Blogs: The End of Civilization As We Know It

That's what the title of this Wall Street Journal editorial should have been. Not to be outdone by last week's expose of the angry left bloggers who use (gasp!) swear words, the WSJ's Daniel Henninger clearly sees such a trend as the downfall of a civilized society and actually argues for repression in his piece titled, "Disinhibition Nation When blogs rule, we'll all talk like ----. " Yes, repression has served cultures well so far, hasn't it? And, we all know that swearing is a contagious disease that spreads from a page directly through your eyes and your brain into your very vunerable soul where it then controls every single word you speak and write - forever. The only cure, of course, is to become a conservative for life.

To make his point, in a non-sensationalist way of course, Henninger begins his column with the story of the notorious Kevin Ray Underwood who confessed last week to the brutal killing of a 10 year-old girl. He had a blog. Henninger at least provides some comfort to those who are new to this whole blog thing. "I don't think the blogosphere is breeding cannibals". Well, that's a relief!

He cautions, though:

But it looks to me as if the world of blogs may be filling up with people who for the previous 200 millennia of human existence kept their weird thoughts more or less to themselves. Now, they don't have to. They've got the Web. Now they can share.

That's rich. Especially since the sharing of "weird thoughts" has pretty much been the raison d'etre of the publishing realm for centuries. By the way, Mr Henninger, you do know that the internet was around long before blogs were created, don't you? And that those "weird thoughts" have been online for years in the form of web pages, newsgroups, bulletin boards and user groups? No? You didn't know that? All right then. Carry on.

Not surprisingly, a new vocabulary has emerged from clinical psychology to describe generalized patterns of behavior on the virtual continent. As described by psychologist John Suler, there's dissociative anonymity (You don't know me); solipsistic introjection (It's all in my head); and dissociative imagination (It's just a game). This is all known as digital identity, and it sounds perfectly plausible to me.

A libertarian would say, quite correctly, that most of this is their problem, so who cares? But there is one more personality trait common to the blogosphere that, like crabgrass, may be spreading to touch and cover everything. It's called disinhibition. Briefly, disinhibition is what the world would look like if everyone behaved like Jerry Lewis or Paris Hilton or we all lived in South Park.

Noooooo! Not "disinhibition"! That obviously is a completely new threat to society and it's all the fault of blogs. Or, is it? And I'll bet a young and pure Mr Henninger never snuck a look at Playboy or Penthouse magazines. Heck, he probably didn't even know they existed if this article is any indication of his sheltered life.

Example: The Web site currently famous for enabling and aggregating millions of personal blogs is called MySpace.com. If you opened its "blogs" page this week, the first thing you saw was a blogger's video of a guy swilling beer and sticking his middle finger through a car window. Right below that were two blogs by women in their underwear.

People drinking beer and wearing underwear? Say it ain't so! I say kids should just stick to watching beer commercials on the teevee that promise The Good Life™ while they furiously flip through the pages of the latest Sears™ catalogue if they want to see scantily-clad women. That's how they did it in the Good Old Days™ when perversions didn't exist. We certainly can't have kids going online and seeing such shocking images that might turn them into one of those select-few cannibals the blogs might spawn.

And bloggers swearing? Well, that's just more proof that the entire world is going to hell in a hand basket. Wasn't "hell" as slang considered to be a cuss word no so long ago? I know I sure wasn't allowed to use it in my home without the risk of being disciplined. But, Henninger says:

The Web is nothing if not "social." But the blogosphere is also the product not of people meeting, but venting alone at a keyboard with all the uninhibited, bat-out-of-hell hyperbole of thinking, suggestion and expression that this new technology seems to release.

I hope his mother doesn't read his columns. He's obviously adding to the coming of the apocalypse.

At the risk of enabling, does the Internet mean that all the rest of us are being made unwitting participants in the personal and political life of, um, crazy people?

Let me ask you a question, Mr Henninger: does the existence of the popular media (newspapers, television and magazines) "mean that all the rest of us are being made unwitting participants in the personal and political life of, um, crazy people?"

That's rhetorical. No need to respond. We already know the answer to that one.