Car Metaphors

Two years ago the sarcastic author of Stoge.org wrote:

Blogging is a form of vanity publishing: you can dress it up in fancy terms, call it “paradigm shifting” or a disruptive technology”, the truth is that blogs consist of senseless teenage waffle. Adopting the blogger lifestyle is the literary equivalent of attaching tinselly-sprinkles to the handelbars of your bicycle…*

My western friends say to me that tinselly-sprinkles should look like on the photo below, not necessary pink though. And I’d better not waste time interpreting it, the comparison is only offensive, without implication.

Five years ago Henry Jenkins came up with a more positive analogy in the article “Blog It!” written for Technology Review:

Bloggers are turning the hunting and gathering, sampling and critiquing the rest of us do online into an extreme sport. We surf the Web; these guys snowboard it. Bloggers are the minutemen of the digital revolution.**

This game with words is exiting. But did not really work for communication design students in the south of Germany, where snowboarding is sport exercised every weekend and surfing would be a matter of extreme excitement, risk and being cool.

Myself, I’m not sure what sport I find more thrilling: surfing or snowboarding (or bicycling). And what is more cool, blogging or not blogging. And five years later it is not possible to talk about bloggers and “the rest of us.” But what I think is specially curious about the analogy of Jenkins is that in fact, if not bloggers and blogging, surfing as an online activity would already vanish.

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*Found in introduction to Geert Lovink’s new book “0 Comments” (2007).
**Quoted from Henry Jenkins compilation of articles “Fans, Bloggers, And Gamers” (2006). The Technology Review site does not keep a copy of it.

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