From Potlucks to Blogs
Potluck season is in full swing here in the Upper Midwest.
We wrapped up the school year with a picnic outside the old middle school — curried rice, mac and cheese and only two bowls of ramen-noodle coleslaw. The soccer team shared potato salad, brownies, baked beans and cheesecake. Next week, we head to a music potluck: bring your instrument and a salad.
The charm of a potluck is that you never know what you’ll get. My friend Julie and I still wonder (feverishly) who brought that amazing rice pudding-meringue to the Youth Choir friendship concert three years ago. We. Want. The. Recipe.
But then sometimes it’s all sweet potatoes, or rhubarb crisp. Those potlucks become legend: Mary, who hosts a Leftovers Potluck on Thanksgiving weekend, keeps hot dogs on hand ever since the year that everyone (yes, everyone) brought sweet potatoes. And one dad on the soccer team swears he was at a dinner once where the only thing served was rhubarb crisp. (Without, apparently, even vanilla ice cream.) No one ever edits the menu; that would take the “luck” out of potluck.
So when I contemplate the ridiculous popularity of blogs, all I can think is: Potluck.
Blogs have turned the Internet into one big smorgasbord of content, and most of it isn’t worth the calories. Everybody brings something to the table, whether they can actually cook or not.
All this Content Potluck is starting to give us indigestion. Look at the lawsuit that a group of lawyers, The Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, filed against craigslist.com for not vetting the 10 million classified ads (especially the 2 million housing listings) that its members post each month. Craigslist execs argue that its sites are basically big bulletin boards, and their small staff couldn’t police them — and shouldn’t, because craigslist is “a community-moderated commons run by and for its users, who self-publish and manage their own ads,” writes CEO Jim Buckmaster on the site.
The suit signals a change in temperament over free-for-all self-publishing online. The more the Internet acts like business, the more oversight it will get. And the general public will learn what professional writers and amateur potluckers already know: If you publish something, you’re responsible for it. If you put a dish on the table, you are feeding your neighbors, and you better have the recipe right.
Witness Pete, the anti-abortion blogger who last month excoriated the fictitious Onion column “I’m Totally Psyched About This Abortion!” thinking it was real; his blog drew 1,400 comments, most of them cussing him out for mistaking satire for news reporting. “You write some article off the cuff and throw it out there and you never know what’s going to happen,” he told a reporter after his very public gaffe.
Maybe that’s what bugs me most about blogs: They don’t have to be credible, or well-written, or even premeditated. With a potluck, at least, you try to bring something tasty so you don’t embarrass yourself with the neighbors. Shouldn’t there be a similar code of honor for blogs?
The Internet has fostered some great personal essays. In the early 90s, a woman at Yoyodyne (Seth Godin’s first company, where he invented “Permission Marketing”), wrote a weekly e-mail that chewed over the minutiae of her week in a Seinfeld kind of way. She was an aspiring stand-up comic, and this was her training ground. She was damned funny. She was worth reading, a novelty back before the onslaught of e-mail newsletters and the morass of Web pages-cum-personal soapboxes where everyone’s talking at the same time, without listening, without editing.
These days, it is more rhubarb crisp than a person can stomach.
