Insight into ZhaoMing

Do bloggers feed off the work of newspapers and magazines? That’s the question of the day in the navel-gazing world of the blogoshpere.

The editor of the Online Journalism Review, Robert Niles, recently decried what he sees as a tendency by journalist to characterize blogs as “a ‘parasitic’ medium” that feeds off the work of traditional newspapers and magazines (http://tinyurl.com/yv67v).

He calls the charge “a poorly informed insult of many hardworking web publishers who are doing fresh, informative and original work.”

Maybe so, but Niles’ protestations notwithstanding, blogs are largely parasitic.

Yes, a handful of bloggers do original reporting, usually on highly specialized topics, but most simply react to news of the day.

The blogosphere, as others have pointed out, act as a kind of global echo chamber. An idea gets swatted around like a ping-pong ball for a few hours until a fresh one takes its place.

But is that really bad? I used to think of blogging’s reactive nature as a flaw in the medium.

I’ve changed my mind, though, I’ve come to believe that being a literary parasite is no bad thing. I’d argue, in fact, hat parasitism is blogging’s most distinctive and probably its most valuable feature.

Online diaries

Bloggers blog for a host of reasons, but what sets blogging apart as a literary form is that it offers a write an easy way to document his or her responses to their day-to-day reading.

The constant flow of text through the eye and mind is a characteristic of many people’s lives, but it has never been possible before to capture the experience so thoroughly and with such immediately as it can be through blogging.

Diaries come closest, but they’re private, and I’d argue that they place more distance between the act of reading and the act of writing about reading.

Te reactive, or parasitical, quality of blogging defined the form from the start. Blogs, after all, began as logs, chronological catalogues of what web surfers discovered in their daily perambulations around the Internet.

Many of the most accomplished and venerable bloggers continue to write in this form.

The least interesting blogs are the ones that simply replicate existing journalistic forms such as news articles, company profiles or product reviews. They can be very useful, and they can certainly be very popular, but they’re blogs in a technical sense only.

In his new book, The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson describes how London’s teeming underclass economy in the mid-19th century was built almost entirely on scavenging.

The poor were parasites who sustained themselves by collecting the leavings of other Londoners – rags, bones, bits of coal and wood, faeces – and, with remarkable enterprise, transforming them into cash.

Our natural instinct, Johnson writes, is “to fulminate against a system that allowed so many thousands to eke out a living by foraging through human waste.”

But our courage, he suggests, should “be accompanied by a measure of wonder and respect.”

After all, “this itinerant underclass managed to conjure up an entire system for processing and sorting the waste generated by two million people.”

Without them, London would have been swallowed up in its own filth.

Recycling information

Johnson goes on to draw an analogy between these human waste-recyclers and their microscopic counterparts, bacteria.

“Without the bacteria-driven processes of decomposition, the Earth would have been overrun by offal and carcasses eons ago,” he reminds us.

“If the bacteria disappeared overnight, all life on the planet would be extinguished within a matter of years.”

Bloggers do similarly useful work. In fact, the blogosphere may best be thought of as a vast digestive tract, breaking down the news of the day into ever-finer particles of meaning (and even more concentrated toxins).

It’s worth remembering that, in a literary context, another word for “parasitic” is critical.” Blogging is, at its essence, a critical form, a means of recycling other writings to ensure that every molecule of sense, whether real or imagined, is distilled and consumed.

So, if someone wants to call my blog parasitic, or even bacterial, that’s fine with me. I’ll consider it not an insult, but a compliment. – NICHOLAS CARR
(Guardian Newspaper Ltd)

Months ago, Gloria and Johnson tagged me...

The rule sounded like this :

"Each player of this game starts off by giving 6 weird things about themselves.
People who get tagged need to write in a blog of their own 6 weird things as
well as state the rules clearly. In the end, you need to choose 6 people to be
tagged and list their names. After you do that, leave them each a comment
letting them know you tagged them and to read your blog."

Weird things about me? Really don't have the brainpower to think as I am down with high fever and suspected for dengue.. Now, I can hardly stand firmly with my weak legs.. Never felt as weak as now before. *curse those callous mosquitoes at Cendana hostel* However, Johnson said that he can help me to write more than 6 weird things leh... Haha...

1. I can survive with 5 hours of sleep during weekdays which my roommates find it impressive. Well, I think it is a habit that I picked up during my King Scout's assessment camps. At that time, I did not sleep a wink for 5 days 4 nights due to the taxing midnight activities. We were required to finish our bamboo gadgets in 2 nights... And my interview with 6 interviewers was held at 2.00 a.m. I can still remember there were so many tests going on, day and night, to the extent that I could only take my meal once a day. Survival skills and alone in the jungle without help certainly tested my independent way of living. Much sweat, time, energy and blood were sacrificed, but thank God... I manage to pass all the assessments. Perhaps I should blog about King Scout and the gruelling process of becoming one in my next post... :-)

2. When I am sick, usually I will wait until it becomes extremely serious only will I take my medication. (Want to train my body immune system ma... :P) And in most of the case, a good and decent sleep can heal almost every illness which I had experienced.

3. Most of the time, I prefer to sleep at the inverse position on the bed. Meaning to say, my legs are on the pillow and head at the other end of the bed.

4. Back at my hometown (KT), I eat Indian pancakes (roti canai) without or with little gravy. Maybe because the pancake tastes so good that you can even eat it on its own. However, so far I am the only guy in KT doing so. Hehe...

5. According to Joanne, I am the "slow-to-hot" kind of person. Yeah, I admit this... Ask Sun Quan if you don't believe me. Once I become very familiar with a person, I can talk and talk and talk craps with him or her until it reaches a certain degree that it seems irritating and crazy. Lolz... That's me alright.

6. Until today, I can still clearly remember the days when I was 3 years old or so which I find it astonishing.


I TAG:
Shou Lee
Si Han
Joash
Catherine
Eu Jeen
Joo Ken