A Regular Blogbath

So, I got this tweet, you know, on Twitter, from my former MA student Mike Plugh, who's quite the blogger, and scholar, himself, and the tweet says:

@lancestrate will appreciate Jon Stewart's "eviscerating" of the blogosphere. Those pesky words! http://tiny.cc/eooSY #generalsemantics

For those of you unfamiliar with tweet-talk, that last bit is called a hashtag, and it functions on Twitter the ways that labels function on blogger, and tags elsewhere, as a kind of indexing of posts or items.  So, Mike was indicating that this item was relevant for general semantics (which also means its relevant for media ecology, and Mike is well versed in both).  

As for the abbreviated URL, it goes straight to the website for The Daily Show, and specifically to a page with a clip from the February 4th episode (which is yesterday as I write this post).  The title given to the clip is The Blogs Must Be Crazy, which it take from one of the all time great media ecological movies, The Gods Must Be Crazy.

As the poster indicates, this film is a comedy, and as comedies go, I'd rate it as one of the best.  But apart from its entertainment value, it also includes a wonderful bit of discourse in a media ecological vein.  That occurs in the first fifteen minutes of the film, and wouldn't you know it but someone has uploaded that clip to YouTube, and here, by the grace of God (or at least some of those crazy gods of the internet) it is:

I first saw this film in the theaters when I was still a doctoral student, and one afternoon Neil Postman said, you have to see this movie, and took a few of us graduate students to the movies (thank you, Neil!).  But now, from the gods back to the blogs must be crazy, and the Daily Show clip, whose caption says

Thursday February 4, 2010

The Blogs Must Be Crazy

According to the blog headlines, Jon is a blood-crazed madman and Rachel Maddow is an eviscerating machine.

And now this:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Blogs Must Be Crazy
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Exaggeration!  Overstatement!  Hyperbole!  Oh my!  Clearly, the blog is not the territory!  And like the oral singers of tales of old, as Walter Ong would point out, the psychodynamics of these blogists (as opposed to yours truly, of course) include a tendency towards agonistically toned content!  


Thanks, Mike!  If anyone should ever come along and eviscerate you, I solemnly vow, before all gods crazy and sane, to avenge you!