Flashes of Panic

Blue Rabbit commented on my earlier "Apolitical (we)blogging" post, and raised a point I think is better not buried in the comments. Simply put, according to this report, people who have contributed to weblogs (and that's including every updated-sometimes and dead LiveJournal as well as the busy, happening "celebrity" webloggers) represent about one in every twenty internet users. And internet users are just about two thirds of the country? So, about one in every thirty Americans has, at some point, posted to a weblog. Ten percent of them (so, roughly one in every three hundred Americans) claim to post more frequently than once a week.

That may be a "community," but it's not a "population" and probably not even a "demographic." The idea that the other two hundred ninety-nine are listening carefully to the one, while not entirely absurd, seems a little bit optimistic to me.

What it reminds me of more than anything is the sort of attitude our area takes towards politics. The two towns I've lived in around here are painfully liberal, not enough that anyone has applied the clichè "People's Republic Of" to them, but enough that "contested election" means the Green Party put in a candidate, and the "W: Let's not elect him in 2004, either" stickers are dense in the parking lots. The general attitude towards the current presidential election is that of course the current administration has done so much damage that of course the righteous rage of the nation will sweep him from office in November. I feel like this is, at best, a head-in-the-sand attitude; after all, pretty much half the nation did vote for the current president in 2004, and just because he's managed to tick off a liberal college town in Massachusetts (as one of my hall residents put it nearly ten years ago, "this commie college in this commie state") doesn't mean he's going to lose enough electoral votes to lose the election.

In other words, just because all your neighbors agree with you, doesn't mean the whole country does.

The reason Halley Suitt is right about political weblogs being less interesting than the regular-people's-lives weblogs (at least, I think she's right) is that regular-people's-lives weblogs are interacting with the so-called "real world" (by which I mean, any community built around something other than the internet.) Political weblogs are arguing with the television and each other, and don't feel real any more. They're only talking to their ideological neighbors, and they think this means everyone sees the world the way they do.

Meanwhile, because I'm multitasking as usual, I need to figure out why Photoshop won't see this EPS the way I do. Do I need to open it in &$%# Classic Mode again?