profesionalization

Sorry for lateness, as My Sunday Thing has slid this week into My Monday Thing and quite nearly Tuesday. Such is a life of casual brutality and 400-level classes deconstructing post-colonial literature. How about that for a pretentious opening? You’re all but required to read the rest to see if I recover.

This is also kind of a discussion piece on blogging, youth demographics, and bringing more people into the online process. For those looking for my usual content, “John McCain is old and crazy, Rudy Giuliani is a white supremacist, and the system is corrupt and must be skull fucked to death.” Neat.

Anyway, one of those things that have been eating at me has been something along these lines: this blog as a concept is supposed to serve as a rally point for youth political operatives looking to ferment serious change in their environments. It is a belief that the infrastructure being built, (democratized, low cost, and with the ability to reach mass audiences) will almost certainly lend itself to the 18-30 set that’s all but grown up anchored in the ins and outs of digital communication.

That attempt at appeal to youth, oddly enough, is completely at odds with the present system. The system, as it stands, is run for boomers.

The picture Bowers paints in his post regarding BlogAds demographic numbers is of a hyper politicized group of people in their late forties, brimming with excess wealth and massive educations just looking to crack some online political skulls. And this bears out in the reading; the content, tone, use of language, all tailors almost exclusively to a true believer, aging audience who want only to take the fight to the Rethuglicans and the Bush Crime Family and KKKarl Rove. The sense of humor is circa 1974, and I don’t mind being quoted that I can find four sharp objects sitting on the desk in front of me that I’d rather drive into my skull right now than read the daily “Cheers and Jeers” post at DailyKos.

The exception to this Boomer-run phenomenon, interestingly, is Wonkette.