It is yet another day in which, if you haven't already, you should get outside for however long you can before the sun goes down. Even if it's just a ten minute walk around the block. I went for a run earlier, and the temperature is just perfect. The guys at the Abos Pizza shop below my apartment are sitting outside in short sleeves.

Blogging is neither a project nor a proposal, but a condition. "We blog," as Kline and Bernstein say. Australian cultural theorist Justin Clemens explains: "Nihilism is not just another epoch amongst a succession of others: it is the finally accomplished form of a disaster that happened a long time ago." To translate this into new-media terms: blogs are witnessing and documenting the diminishing power of mainstream media, but they have consciously not replaced its ideology with an alternative. Users are tired of top-down communication – and yet have nowhere else to go. [...] Bloggers are nihilists because they are "good for nothing". They post into Nirvana and have turned their futility into a productive force. They are the nothingists who celebrate the death of the centralized meaning structures and ignore the accusation that they would only produce noise.

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-01-02-lovink-en.html


I think I have to agree with someone's comment at Mefi: the academic blowhards are just jealous that we bloggers have proven ourselves far more capable than them at producing enourmous amounts of boring, meaningless, pretentious, psuedo-intellectual bullshit. So no, sorry, I'm not going to get off his lawn. ;]

That said, to interpret this as an attack on bloggers is probably incorrect. He doesn't seem to be saying that blogging being inherently nihilistic is a bad thing. In fact he seems to think it's a natural reaction to a world where more centralized media is slowing losing power. However, I still say this guy wouldn't know the difference between nihilism and postmodernism if both of them walked up and bit huge chunks out of his ass.