Because I’m a baseball fan, I lurk around blogs that follow the St. Louis Cardinals.
The blog I follow most closely is filled with young guys who love analyzing statistics. They collect stats on everything — from launch angles to exit velocities — and discuss the latest ways of mining meaning from arcane details.
I lurk because I’m lost. When I was a boy in West Texas, my father and I would listen to KMOX, the voice of St. Louis. We were thrilled when Stan the Man Musial came to the plate. We cheered at the emergence of a young outfielder named Lou Brock. If those topics come up at all on the blogs, the discussion is about what grandfathers once said.
The young guys talk about all kinds of new things, and I’ve had to explore to understand their tastes in music, books, film and food. These guys were born into a world that included the Internet and social media, and so I was surprised by a long thread — interrupting discussion of the Cardinals’ prospects in the coming season — that denounced Meta, X, Google and the gang.
One guy argued that the ethical collapse of the bigger and better tools makes it important to keep “the old blogosphere alive.” If you have a trusted URL, maintain it, he said.
I was surprised by the call to see value in the old and out-of-date.
No comments:
Post a Comment