Alright, mr. angry lib’rl…
October 3rd, 2008Aden Nak is one of those bloggers that frustrate me.
He makes this kind of excellent point:
Well said, sir. This kind of thought provoking observation that I’d like to get all of my Republican neighbors and relatives to consider. But your impact is going to be drastically reduced because you’ve camped out so far on your own end of the debate that nobody on the other side of the aisle will even be able to hear your shrill but clever voice.
Why would you say, as if it were the damning evidence, your opinion of Sarah Palin that “She’s fucking dumb, okay?“ I mean, sure that’s probably the case but anyone who doesn’t already agree with you is going to write you off right there, click their back button, and never think about you again. You’ve gotten their attention and web traffic by creating a zeitgeisty flow chart
(why is this not already posted to graphjam, anyway?), and so you’re getting tons of hits. You’ve put together some excellent logic with your bullet point list of what we’ve learned from the Palin-Couric interview but it won’t reach the attention of those people who have yet to make up their minds. You’ve provoked one of the following in people that would be your target audience: anger, dread, frustration. Notably absent from that list is thought.
Now, this is all assuming you’re trying to make a difference. If you’re just ranting to rant well … Sorry, my mistake. Go on with your bad self. That’s one of the reasons to have a blog at all, I suppose.
But you haven’t made your message something I can send to my Granny or my mom. Or people like them in battleground states. I can’t send them a link to your post which says “Sarah Palin is a stupid, self important, ignorant bitch” in the second sentence. They won’t even get through the first paragraph! Maybe if you inverted the flow of your rant and lead the audience up to that idea you’d be more effective. But please, please make yourself relevant. Entertaining those people “a-carryin’ signs mostly say hoo-ray for our side” isn’t what is needed at this moment. We need some collateral for everybody who is putting their effort into making the great schlep … especially those of us who can only schlep virtually.
I hope that you have not squandered your genius in the moment of relevance, your fifteen seconds of fame. You obviously know what you’re doing or you wouldn’t have put your URL in the image that is going viral at this very moment. Emotions are certainly running high right now and keeping them in check is going to be important if this unusually important election is going to mark an improvement in the world or … well, or worse.
Filed under: Politics, The Internet
