Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Zephoria points to the blogging connection of an essay by Rudy Ramirez, “Authorizing Activism: Arundhati Roy and the Performance of the Public Intellectual.” [Essay as Word doc.] She (Danah Boyd) says: Of particular interest is the lit review discussion about the collapse of the public intellectual and the rise of the pundit, whereby professional standards are at issue as well as a concern that narrow expertise does not necessarily imply moral authority. All of this is highly relevant to the blogging community. Trying to decode what Ramirez is saying, however, felt like sucking on Hanukkah geld that I couldn’t unwrap. The essay stays inside the usual mesh bag of loud allegiance to every possible PC ideal. And, standing in for tinfoil that jars your fillings, it’s packed with postmodern* jargon–nobody ever “does” or “says” anything; instead they “perform” it.

Here are a few of the interesting ideas I think Ramirez expresses:

• The role of “public intellectual” is under siege, because audiences just want punchy sound bites.
• Expertise gives you no authority to make moral statements–neither does celebrity, of course, but audiences are curious about what celebrities think.
• OTOH celebrity is more fragile than expertise–if Roy stops being photogenic and “famous” then her message loses its interest to the public.
• Professional intellectuals may be corrupted by those who pay for their expertise.
• Therefore Ramirez prefers to think of Roy as an amateur intellectual rather than as a celebrity pundit.

All in all, it’s an intriguing essay, with interesting applications to blogging.

* Still, although it quotes Foucault once, it is Derrida-free.

If you used to subscribe to my blog using Bloglines–they just unsubscribed you. They unsubscribed 51 people, including me.

If you want to read the whole frustrating interaction, with frequent
appearances of the Bloglines sig “Tell a friend about Bloglines,” I posted it here.

If you want to keep up with the latest Betsy news and funny stuff, please subscribe to
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This November doesn’t match Keats’s autumn triumphalism–“mists and mellow fretfulness” would be more like it.

Here comes winter, and Halley does not want to go there.

Rabble-rousing and vitriol are bad for you, says Lisa, settling down to read some philosophy.

That’s enough foliage, woodsmoke. and nostalgia, says Maciej, kissing his Vermont apple trees good-bye.

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, I met “Zamora“, blogging his year off from college, who asks “Is a right-wrong dichotomy strictly wrong?“

Also on the plus side–news from BloggerCon 3. In her “core values” session, Mary Hodder (Napsterization) led a far-ranging discussion to some worthwhile conclusions. I also loved Enoch Choi’s blog-report of Julie Leung’s session, “The Emotional Life of Weblogs. Good work by Dave Winer, again.

Friday, I finally had lunch with Jim McGee (McGee’s Musings).
This was a long-delayed pleasure, prompted by Buzz Bruggeman who urged
us to get together.

How long delayed? So chaotic were both our summers that, when we
finally sat down to the buffet lunch at the Bombay Club, Jim was toting two carry-ons, headed back to Chicago.

I won’t duplicate Jim’s generous and witty blogging of our talk.
Jim is a knowledge-management honcho, and it shows when you talk to him
or read his stuff. Just one of Jim’s comments that I found fascinating:

“In our society, we tend to privatize profits and socialize costs.”

I just Amazon-ordered Garrett
Hardin’s Filters Against Folly: How to Survive Despite Economists, Ecologists, and the Merely Eloquent,
as recommended by Jim.

p.s. If Buzz Bruggeman web-troduces you to Jim,
don’t waste two months before having lunch with him!

Podcasters Dave Winer and Adam Curry just keep adding bells and whistles to their product. The latest is the addition of “Morning Stories,” a wonderful public radio series from Tony Kahn!

I don’t know when (or if) they’ll be broadcasting the show I did for Tony–the one with a gladiator striptease soundtrack–about my first year of blogging.

In case they don’t, you can hear my five minutes here. You have to wait for the end to hear Russell Crowe’s armor hit the floor, piece by piece…..

When I need advice from a brilliant young geeks, where better to find it than in the IRC of Joi Ito? Here is some good advice I got from ado, aka Adriaan Tijsseling, developer of ecto (http://ecto.kung-foo.tv), who blogs at http://blog.kung-foo.tv and is aka adriaaaaaaaaaaaaaan.

[9:36:30:] Betsy_Devine: Hey, anybody here know how to spell “rulez”? I think it should be “r00lz” or something, shouldn’t it?
[9:36:48:] ado: it’s “rules”…
[9:36:54:] Betsy_Devine: Or maybe if I can’t spell it I just shouldn’t try.
[9:37:09:] Betsy_Devine: Oh, ado, how am I going to sound hip if I spell it like that?
[9:37:18:] ado: never try to sound hip
[9:37:22:] Betsy_Devine: :-(
[9:37:24:] imajes_: heh
[9:37:24:] ado: you are hip or you aren’t
[9:37:28:] Betsy_Devine: meef

Un-hip people are known for ignoring sound advice.

Sorry, Manila design gurus, but could I have your attention–again?

First of all, thanks to Userland for the comment-spam fix
you made in August. You cleverly made it easy to erase comments when
somebody leaves a whole bunch on a single post. So, please add checkboxes to my discussion page too, so that I
can delete wholesale comments even when they got added to lots of
different posts.

This new comment spammer knows more blogware tricks than I do. For example, even after I turned off comments, he added 10 more new ones. So now my readers can’t share legitimate comments, but spammers can slurp up Google-juice anyway… Please don’t let spammers leave comments when I’ve turned comments off.

When I use membership prefs to block one of his aliases, he creates
another–even though Manila knows that all this garbage is coming from
the same IP address! (At least that’s what I think it means when the
user profile for members named “poker”, “phentermine”, “online
gambling”, etc. all link to the same user profile:
http://BetsyDevine.weblogger.com/profiles/$159.) Please don’t let members I’ve deleted or blocked sign up again with new names and phony email addresses.

Thanks for letting me scream, and have a nice day. I plan to myself, once I erase those stupid spam comments….

This is not how I like to think of bloggers:

Remember, a blog is basically a diary that logs consumer narratives on a public, non-erasable hard-drive known as the Internet. A good percentage of blog content reflects consumer experiences with “branded” products or services.

Hey, I know lots of folks with similarly sharp focus. I know people who think:

• Weekends are basically time to spend getting drunk.
• Women are basically an opportunity to get a look at their breasts.
• Mornings are basically time to waste writing long blog posts. (heh)

People who focus too narrowly miss a lot.

Link to Pete Blackshaw via Steve Rubel, a marketing pro who seems to have more perspective on what blogging means.