Blog Ecology: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

This great blogosphere of ours is a place where two of the three Rs of waste management are taken quite seriously but the other is ignored completely. There is really no incentive to Reduce since posting is both easy and generally free. Reusing and Recycling are themselves quite easy; in fact, it is usually easier than coming up with something completely new. Most of the Reused material one encounters is not the result of copying but rather just the fact that very few bloggers live particularity interesting lives or are experts on interesting subjects. Most of us just live normal lives and have our gripes, our good days, and our strange experiences on this crazy ol' Internet. As for good material that gets passed around - well, I think that may be what the blogosphere has going for it. Information is being spread in a totally new way, and it will be a while before we learn all of the advantages and disadvantages of the system.

But most of the stuff out there isn't particularity good. I certainly don't recommend reading this blog unless you know who I am and care at least a little bit about me. You won't find any great literature, philosophy, or treatises here. But I do try to maintain some standards. I try to limit posts as long as this one to three a month. I try to keep my ellipses in check. (Haven't we all seen blogs that look like this?...yeah...I think we have...but you know...I guess this is just easier that selecting proper punctuation...) I try to keep my gripes to a minimum. And I try not to use completely generic content, like the results of internet quizzes.

My suitemate Mike vented his frustration about this matter earlier this month. In a post on The Glog, he proposed some biting replies to heavily Recycled material encountered on other people's blogs. For example he suggested:

When someone posts their results of some stupid quiz

"Awesome! I always wondered what sort of (19th century Peruvian peasant) you would be. Now that I know, I'm a more complete human being and no longer have that tremendous void in my life."

And Mike is right to be irritated. Most quizzes are ridiculously stupid, and most of them have no more than, say, six possible outcomes. But even tired old material can be entertaining if its well done. Shakespeare borrowed and plagiarized more than anyone, but the way he combined worn out genres in new ways and generally did everything better than his contemporaries and predecessor allowed him to create works that were immensely popular during his own time and were able to remain popular over the past four centuries.

I'm not sure if we'll ever encounter a Shakespeare of the blogosphere, but there are certainly people out there who do better the same things everyone else does. There are even a handful of good quizzes out there. I found "The Country Quiz," which makes some sense, since countries tend to have behavioral characteristics analogous to those in people. The quiz isn't tedious (there are only six questions), but it yields 64 different results, which all seem to have a mix of admirable and not-so-admirable traits. Here's what it told me:

YOU'RE FRANCE!



Most people think you're snobby, but it's really just that you're better than everyone else.  At least you're more loyal to the real language, the fine arts, and the fine wines than anyone else.  You aren't worth beans in a fight, unless you're really short, but you're so good at other things that it usually doesn't matter.  Some of your finest works were intended to be short-term projects.

I this is a reasonable three-sentence summary of me if you take it with a wry smile. And I can't complain about being compared with a country like France, which, for better or worse, has never blended in to the European landscape. If you're interested in seeing your own results you can take the Country Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.