I like the article on many fronts. First, Will explains the outright idiocy of naming the Person of the Year, “you.” (or me):
Most bloggers have the private purpose of expressing themselves for their own satisfaction. There is nothing wrong with that, but there is nothing demanding or especially admirable about it, either. They do it successfully because there is nothing singular about it, and each is the judge of his or her own success.
George Will is exactly right. First, let’s simply face the fact that even the best bloggers who publish (e.g. Andrew Sullivan) have an enormously large amount of hatred brought on towards them. And if you don’t want to call it hatred, then it has to be the most undignified form of critique to which I have ever bared witness. And that’s the best. What I do is a FAR cry from Greg Mankiw, so you might as well throw me in with the rest of people that George Will is eluding.
Will throws the final blow as such:
Time's issue includes an unenthralled essay by NBC's Brian Williams, who believes that raptures over the Web's egalitarianism arise from the same impulse that causes today's youth soccer programs to award trophies -- "entire bedrooms full" -- to any child who shows up: "The danger just might be that we miss the next great book or the next great idea, or that we will fail to meet the next great challenge . . . because we are too busy celebrating ourselves and listening to the same tune we already know by heart."
The fact that Stengel included Williams's essay proves that Stengel's Time has what 99.9 percent of the Web's content lacks: seriousness.
A great op-ed piece from Will and here’s to hoping that if you provide content on the web, that you are actually providing something that isn’t wholly self-serving.
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