November 13, 2006

Are you resisting the ego-strengthening exercise of indiscriminate submission?

Amba worries about what bloggers are losing.

6 comments:

Mortimer Brezny said...

Holy catchy blog-title, Batman! And I thought I was creepy! Way to go, Ann, for making me feel waaay to normal for this website.

wv: fnhieue, a synonym for chutzpah

Boy, that Ann has effin' hieue!

amba said...

Actually, that's backwards. "Indiscriminate submission" is "I started this book, I've got to finish it." And then sometimes you're glad you did. That's not ego-strengthening, that makes your ego more humble and permeable.

I think blogging makes us more stubbornly who we are and less willing to yield to someone else's vision, for better and for worse. It makes us less willing to be "audience" and more insistent on participating for something to sustain our interest, for better and for worse.

Ann Althouse said...

Amba: I understood that. You're worried that bloggers are resisting and therefore losing the experience of submission.

amba said...

My bad (grammar), anyway. Clarified.

vw: zoflas

(anti-antidepressant? cousin of Borat?)

Maxine Weiss said...

Just the opposite...the internet makes me hunger for depth, and something without a ticker going across the screen.

Remember the days when a screen was just a screen, without all these branding symbols and tickers?

Depth, substance = the ability to focus.


Peace, Maxine

Josef Novak said...

"Depth, substance = the ability to focus."

A deliciously contradictory, impossible soundbyte! Did you mean it that way?

And wasn't the althouse entry linked to in Amba's post a little disingenuous? I mean, we are talking about a professor of law, who has 'loaded tons of information into [her] brain' and no doubt still requires her students to do the same.

Maybe the internet is fragmenting our collective (un)conscious[ness], but if one is so inclined it can just as easily serve as portal to places of tremendous depth. Ever check out mathworld.wolfram.com?
What about the web portal to your local university library? [OK, I know you're already aware of these things... this just sounded a bit like the age old "kids these days...", or "politicians these days are so corrupt..." adages]