If ever you needed confirmation that being gay was like being in high school for the rest of your life, this is it. Joe.My.God and an unknown number of other like-minded bloggers have decided to punish Rocco for his offensive and often homophobic blog. However, since this is BlogLand, where one's identity is merely an aggregation of speeding electrons, there's not much they can do to him. They could write pissy comments on Rocco's blog, but Rocco could just delete them. Thus, these bloggers decided to take a high-minded approach and de-link Rocco's blog. Fair enough. The only problem was that none of these bloggers linked to Rocco, since linking obviously demonstrates a tacit approval of the blogger and/or his blog. So they decided to take the next best step and de-link anybody who links to Rocco. As Joe put it, he de-linked blogs that link to Rocco's blog on the theory that he "really hated the idea of someone getting to this guy's lousy blog via mine, however convoluted the connection." Even if the de-linked person was a good friend.
Oh, and Joe neglected to tell his friends that he did this.
Now, Joe is a smart man, so he must realize how foolish this idea is. First off, Joe apparently only de-linked first-degree links. So if Joe linked to a blog that links to another blog that links to Rocco's blog, the first blog is not de-linked. And since we're not just talking about the entire Internet, and not even about blogs in general but about a tiny subset of blogs (that is, blogs by gay men), well... Let's just say that it's REALLY easy to get from Blog A to Blog B.
And Joe's attempts to avoid the consequences of his behavior by not talking about it (until, that is, he posted it on his blog)? I don't need to go there.
You're on a fool's errand, Joe. Give it up.
But even if Joe and his gang were somehow able to purify their blog links, what of it? I don't know whether I'd like Rocco as a person, but I do know that I don't read Rocco's blog anymore -- not because I found it offensive (which I often did), but because (1) it's boring and (2) it's not meant for me. I don't care which of his rugby teammates he hates this week. I've never met any of them and almost certainly never will. If he wants to call one of them a Vadge of the Week, what standing do I have to complain?
I certainly have no expectation that Rocco would like my blog or even read it. There are only about three people in the world who care what I think about hotel soap, and he's not one of them.
So take a chill pill, Joe. You're not going to make the world a better place by de-linking your friends. Besides, Oliver's your study buddy, and if you drop him now, you're totally going to bomb on that trig exam next Friday.
Oh, and Joe neglected to tell his friends that he did this.
Now, Joe is a smart man, so he must realize how foolish this idea is. First off, Joe apparently only de-linked first-degree links. So if Joe linked to a blog that links to another blog that links to Rocco's blog, the first blog is not de-linked. And since we're not just talking about the entire Internet, and not even about blogs in general but about a tiny subset of blogs (that is, blogs by gay men), well... Let's just say that it's REALLY easy to get from Blog A to Blog B.
And Joe's attempts to avoid the consequences of his behavior by not talking about it (until, that is, he posted it on his blog)? I don't need to go there.
You're on a fool's errand, Joe. Give it up.
But even if Joe and his gang were somehow able to purify their blog links, what of it? I don't know whether I'd like Rocco as a person, but I do know that I don't read Rocco's blog anymore -- not because I found it offensive (which I often did), but because (1) it's boring and (2) it's not meant for me. I don't care which of his rugby teammates he hates this week. I've never met any of them and almost certainly never will. If he wants to call one of them a Vadge of the Week, what standing do I have to complain?
I certainly have no expectation that Rocco would like my blog or even read it. There are only about three people in the world who care what I think about hotel soap, and he's not one of them.
So take a chill pill, Joe. You're not going to make the world a better place by de-linking your friends. Besides, Oliver's your study buddy, and if you drop him now, you're totally going to bomb on that trig exam next Friday.
5 Comments:
Your timeline is a bit screwed up.
I only chose to talk about it AFTER two of the delinked bloggers wrote posts about it this morning.
One of them asked me why I had delinked him, and I (probably stupidly) replied honestly, for which I was repaid with screencaps of my email.
Otherwise, the entire situation would remain unnoticed.
Good point. I stand corrected. My timeline was off, and if your friends had not posted entries about this, nobody would have noticed. You fessed up and got bitch-slapped for it.
But to my mind at least, that's not the central issue. The central issue is that you failed to notify your friends that you were going to de-link them. It's classic avoidance behavior.
Remember, this is high school, so if you're going to demote Oliver from your 4th best friend to your 6th best friend, you need to tell him about it beforehand.
what everybody is overlooking is that the entire theme of the Blog Burning post was that i was uncertain things were handled ethically. calling me out for doing something that i've already publicly expressed reservations about seems a bit punitive.
here are a couple of other takes on it all...
http://www.portifex.com/Gostrey/
http://brzinnyc.blogspot.com/2005/09/pointless-barking.html
With all due respect to Jose (BrizNYC), I think he's off point. No one is debating whether you've got the right to de-link people. Of course you've got the right to de-link anybody you please.
But with all due respect to you, I think you are off point as well. I believe your ethical quandary over de-linking people is irrelevant. You de-linked your friends, and as silly as this sounds, they took offense. You de-linked them and left them to discover it on their own.
If anything, the fact that you struggled with de-linking your friends only supports my hypothesis, which is this: You knew that de-linking your friends would offend them, so to avoid the anticipated discomfort of telling them, you denied to yourself that it happened. But surely you must have known that the consequences of de-linking and not telling would be worse than if you had owned up to the fact from the outset.
That's what interests me, Joe. Why did you think that de-linking your friends was a good idea, and why did you avoid telling them? My guess is that in both cases you let your emotions rather than reason guide you.
In a nutshell, Joe was and is a weenie and thats all I've got to say about that.
Post a Comment
<< Home