No Pajamas, Please!
Okay, so there's this interesting court case going on in California in which the question, arises: "At a Suit's Core: Are Bloggers Reporters, Too?" (by Johathan Glater, in the NYTimes). It's fascinating, and the question is interesting and all that, but here's the bit that bothers me:
Attempting to draw a distinction based on the medium used by the blogger or reporter is misguided, said Jack Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School (also a blogger). "In 15 years, there may be no clear distinction between reporters on the one hand and bloggers on the other," he said. "It won't just be an either-or, where you have a reporter for The Chicago Tribune on the one hand, and a guy sitting in his pajamas drinking beer on the other."
This is such a stupid stereotype. I mean, if we're all really sitting here in the privacy of our rec rooms, drinking beer (generally: tea or diet soda for me) and scratching our balls (no comment) and belching (I probably fart more than belch, actually), why in the world would we be wearing pajamas (regardless of whether I'm an actual "blogger" or merely someone who uses blog software instead of scraps of paper that I keep losing)?
If I'm going to go to all the trouble and lonliness of solitary typing (as Truman Capote said of Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, that's typing."), I'm not going to wear pajamas: I'm going to sit at my computer naked, without a stitch on, in my birthday suit thank you very much! (Although, if I wanted to spread a rumor about it, I'd probably claim to be wearing SpongeBob SquarePants pajamas, just to drive all the right-wing wackoes crazy worrying about hidden and not-so-hidden messages about the recruiting and the militant homosexual agenda in everything I type.) So deal with it.
But anyway, he's probably right and they'll be indistinguishable in very short order. I'm wondering how long it will be before some outfit, possibly a real newspaper or some other outfit, hires a bunch of bloggers to sit at computers in cubicles in some office building and type their stuff which may or may not be journalism, just so that the owner of said outfit can force all those bloggers to wear real clothes instead of pajamas.