White-hot blog du jour
Simon Dumenco, in New York Magazine, notes that no one actually reads any more; they just catch the summary on the blog.
As a writer for this and other magazines, I find my stuff often gets linked to by assorted bloggers. Over the past year in particular, I ve noticed more and more of my friends and colleagues saying things along the lines of I saw you on Gawker (Gawker.com, the Manhattan-centric and media-crazed white-hot blog du jour). There is, increasingly, no pretense of actually having read what I ve written, or even having the intention to read what I ve written. This is a qualitatively different declaration from the pre-blog-era I saw your piece in New York which, if the person hadn t read it yet, was always tinged with a mixture of guilt and faux anticipation, as expressed in a follow-up statement ( Haven t had a chance to read it yet, but . . . or Can t wait to read it ).
I saw you on Gawker, though, has a certain hermetic finality. The person saying this, of course, already has a rough idea of what I ve written about, thanks to Gawker empress Elizabeth Spiers s pithy summary. So there s really no pressing need for my purported readers to actually read what I ve written. Spiers has done that for them! There is therefore no need to feel guilt or any further obligation. Engaging by proxy is virtually as good as actually engaging.
More to the point, though, I saw you on Gawker (or Romenesko or iwantmedia.com or mediabistro.com) is a way for the blog reader to say, Good for you that you wrote something that somebody in a position to know has decided is interesting or relevant or mildly amusing.
And it works at a subtly self-congratulatory level, too, of course: It s a way of saying, I m clever enough to know that all the clever things I need to know are on [insert blog name here].
