Bill Maher Mentions Blogging
I was watching the season premier of Bill Maher on HBO last weekend. He is a cocky SOB, a self-professed playboy, who changes model girlfriends like underwear and personally, I find that Jon Stewart is wittier, but I happen to agree with most of his views on things.
Anyway, he was saying how we (the Americans) often say that we cherish privacy, but in actuality, we are a bunch of self-absorbed, exhibitionist attention whores. He brought up a number of examples to support his argument. One of them was the fact so many people want to be on reality shows or as he put it, "People actually compete to be on a show called 'Big Brother'!" He went on to mention how people want you to "Please, read my blog" as another example. Touche, Bill, touche...
I still harbor some personal disdain for blogging as I remember how, in the late 1990's, the IRC community, which I was a part of, frowned upon the great grand-daddy of modern blogging, The LiveJournal! It was the domain of whiny, depressed goth teenagers and vain, attention-craving girls, the place where they posted their awful gothic poetry and underwear webcam pics. I just realized that most of today's blogging activity would fit into that description as well. (chuckle)
These days, the depressed goth boys have all grown up and become the uber-geek "power bloggers". For the most part, their writing abilities have greatly improved and instead of bitching about how the school jocks pick on them and their parents "just don't get them", they now write witty, mildly-useful little articles on network security, W3C-compliant web design and the like. In between those articles, they insert random bits from their lives, mostly for the purpose of bragging about their newly-achieved life status; a link to a picture gallery featuring their hot foreign student girlfriend and/or Lexus, a description of their new gazillion megapixel SRL camera (complete with horribly-shot pics), their endless, 4-star hotel business trips, etc. When they express an opinion on something outside of their immediate area of expertise, it's usually incredibly shallow and cliche. I'm afraid they are still as annoying as they were back on LiveJournal.
posted by Prizrak at 2/23/2006 11:32:00 AM
2 Comments:
Funny him being a celebrity and saying that. I wonder if he likes to have his privacy, or if the fact that he is a celebrity means that he is not entitled to any private life.
Sure there are people who want to be on reality TV and there are people who blog, but I think that most people want to choose what is private and what is not. That's the point, it's their choice and not the government's.
Bill Maher's reasoning is invalid. Obviously, society is more complex than the small segment we see on TV or the net, but Hollywood often doesn't see that.
Bill is a satirist and just like cartoonists, they tend to exagerate things in order to make a point.
In this particular case, it was in a really light context and he was taking a jab at this culture of egotism that is fairly prevalent in our society. He wasn't really addressing privacy issues, which by the way, he does have very strong opinions on.
He is most definitelly a libertarian when it comes to social issues.
Post a Comment
<< Home