I am a "anonymous, scrofulous nerd pumping meaningless drivel into cyberspace at all hours of the day and night simply because I [he] can’t find a girl to sleep with me [him]."
That comment, my dear sir, is offensive, full of half-researched assumptions and as bigoted as any site filled with "hideous racism" that you find so abhorrent.
Mike Stopforth makes the point that: "..blogging is not wannabe journalism. I keep hearing Print pro’s comparing the two, looking for ways to differentiate, looking for ways to attach relevance and importance. Blogging is it’s own practice, together with the wider digital social networking practice, and I think seeing all bloggers as try-hard journalists is unhelpful"
I agree.
I also agree with Alan at MediaFrenzy that this is the most fantastic piece of marketing that Mr Bullard could possibly have asked for. Perhaps it will indicate the reach of the ZA blogosphere to him.
I sympathise with his attack on the offensive bloggers, but must point out that the wonderful thing is that those of us who are offended can and do use this very medium to expose and challenge bigotry on blogs. As in here.
As for me, when I play my air guitar I play it to the late '60s tune of Mr David Bowie. It's a song called Conversation Piece, and it goes like this:
"And my essays lying scattered on the floor, fulfill their need just by being there."
3 comments:
I was so interested in this post that unusually for me, I followed the links and read what both David Bullard and Mike Stopforth had to say.
Curiously, I have never seen blogging as a forum for wannabe journalists. As Mike says, it is its own medium and is undertaken for a multitude of different reasons, but I'd hazard a guess that the majority of the millions of bloggers worldwide are using their blogs for everything but journalistic motives.
I believe that most people simply want to communicate with other people in the world, and it has become a fascinating way of learning about other cultures from the people who live them, and not from books written by journalists with their own agenda ;-)
Even more curiously, I did a post myself on the subject of people's motivation for blogging yesterday, and not once has journalism been mentioned either by me or by those who have commented. So, I wonder if Mr Bullard really meant what he said or whether he was just using the journalist's well known ploy of winding up his audience to gain some personal publicity!
I rather think he did it for the latter reason Mrs V. South African columnists, indeed clumnists the world-over, are fairly talented in getting peoples hackles up and those who don't see that are easily offended... as they say, there's no such thing as bad publicity and Mr Bullard is obviously looking for a new gameplan for drumming up readership.
In effect he has become the thing he insulted in the first place purely to make himself more known.
I woudl advise a healthy sprinkling of salt with anything he says.
African Ways is now published through Lulu.com, Guy. If you put this number:822627 in their search field, you can take a look at it! Quite exciting it is.
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