Egonet
Michael Kinsley has a column in today's Washington Post that marvels at the humongous display of egos that is the internet. In a way, it is kind of a lament that there are now people able to reach some audience, however small, without going through the massive egos of the gatekeepers of the old media. But the article is kind of amusing even if it is kind of pointless. (Nope, no ego here).
If so, we are all crazy now. There is something about the Web that brings out the ego monster in everybody. It's not just the well-established tendency to be nasty. When you write for the Web, you open yourself up to breathtakingly vicious vitriol. People wish things on your mother, simply for bearing you, that you wouldn't wish on Hitler.
But even in their quieter modes, denizens of the Web seem to lug around huge egos and deeply questionable assumptions about how interesting they and their lives might be to others.
This is strange. Anonymity, for better or for worse, is supposed to be one of the signature qualities of the Web. As that dog in the New Yorker cartoon says, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." The Internet is a place where you can interact with other people and have complete control over how much they know about you. Or supposedly that is the case, and virtually everybody on the Internet is committed to achieving that goal.
But anonymity does not actually seem to interest many of the Web's most devoted users. They are the ones who start their own sites or sign up for MySpace or submit videos to YouTube. Indeed, the most successful Web sites seem to be those where people can abandon anonymity and use the Internet to stake their claims as unique individuals. Here is a list of my friends. Here are all the CDs in my collection. Here is a picture of my dog. On the Internet, not only does everybody know that you're a dog, everybody knows what kind of dog, how old, your taste in collars, your favorite dog food recipe and so on.
Of course, his sweeping generalizations get it wrong. Not all the denizens of the interwebby tubes are dogs. Some are crabs.
Blogosphere, Media | Gaius Tuesday, 28 November , 2006
By WWB, Tuesday, 28 November , 2006 @ 8:11 am
FWIW, I’m somewhere in the neighborhood of 96% and 97% sure the unnamed egotistical Washington journalist with a website in the column’s first to paragraphs are Andrew Sullivan.