Obama's China itinerary revealed
Shanghai Photographer Night at Dada
Monitors remind classmates that love is publically unacceptable
Go ahead, stare at my chest
Racism in China: How poignant is it?
Let’s open up the old Shanghaiist mailbag. Our good friend and clever moniker-maker “Simon Templar” writes:
Whats with all these blogs of drivel on the internet. Who really wants to share your experience in eating jaozi in Beijing or climbing the great wall or your inane conversations with locals.I rue the day they invented blogs. It just affords an opportunity for talentless writers to put uninteresting drivel on the net. In the old days, before the internet, if you were an inspiring writer, you sent your tome to a publisher and you learnt quick smart whether you had any talent as a writer by the time it took for the rejection letter to reach your mailbox.
Now, all these failed writers and commentators are free to place mundane crap on the internet and display their lack of writing talent for the world to endure.
Good god...give it a rest.
Simon,
First, let us say that we here at Shanghaiist appreciate your readership. Naturally you must have taken the time to review our work before arriving at your opinion. We do, however, beg to disagree in one fundamental way: where you seem to see the Internet, and blogs specifically, as a medium commandeered by half-wits and failures, we see it as a fantastic democratization of information. Certainly, there are inherent dangers -- more along the lines of accountability than ability we would argue -- but the freedom to have access to an audience previously unthinkable, and vice versa the access of the reader to ideas, is mostly good. We leave it to the readers to decide whether to return, and in the thousands daily they do. Despite our limited resources, we are proud of the content we provide, and you are welcome to take it or leave it. But to wish to deny others the opportunity to participate, poorly or otherwise, seems like a tremendous step backwards.
Happy Surfing,
Shanghaiist
For our readers still with us interested in a recommendation on where to eat Beijing jiaozi, go here; for some introductory information on the Great Wall go here; if you want to have a conversation with a local person go outside, and be sure to blog about it.
Photo from Microsoft Windows Clip Gallery.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
post to facebook
This Simon guy is one elitist pinhead.
Sorry, Simon, if your life isn't interesting enough to blog about!
While the question remains of what Simon Testy does with his time apart from write that kind of thing, he has a small point.
Not about blogs in my opinion, but possibly about writing about China. Everytime someone with zero writing ability says "the Middle Kingdom" instead of China (mostly in free magazines, this month's culprit was TV's Andrew Balleno in That's Shanghai), it grates, as it does if you type in Shanghai in Flickr and get bombarded with a million dull photographs of the Jin Mao, or of someone's wedding registration or what they had for tea.
However I love blogs, the more mundane the better (in some way). I enjoy the voyeurism and banality of life.
I only find blogs idiotic when the writers spend their time thinking "how can I wittily criticise anything Chinese today". Like 'you know what? Chinese people drive really badly! See how I can stretch that point out over 10 paragraphs!'.
Maybe so, but there is a lot more to blogs than stories of jiaozi eating and traffic. Admittedly, there is a lot of blogs that are journals for someone trying to work out their issues and have opinion stated as fact. However, there are also a lot of blogs that are decent alternative news sources with good research and good writing. Its just a format, and as with everything else on the net, is a representation of the collective mind - with all its varying degrees of truth, insanity, news, and observation.. and as with everything else on net, there is crap and there are gems. Its up to the reader to find relevance.
"In the old days, before the internet, if you were an inspiring writer, you sent your tome to a publisher and you learnt quick smart whether you had any talent as a writer by the time it took for the rejection letter to reach your mailbox."
Reading the above paragraph, I have three questions for my iPOD (idiotic Pet Of the Day), Simon:
- Do you really see no qualitative distinction between blog and paper publishing, as two separate mediums? I feel stupid just from pointing this out.
- Where does this assumption come from, everything blogger is "an inspiring writer"? Speak for yourself.
- Oh, the admirable judgment of editors in the good old days...... so sound and error-proof that the likes of a young Bronte or Conrad "learnt quick smart" that they had no talent, from those Titans of Genius, like Joe the Editorial Peon (a.k.a. the pallid-skinned sedentary pedophile). BTW: what's Joe's last name? Has the ungrateful public already forgot these blithe rejectors of great works we are still reading?
Ma,
Sorry but you are wrong. Publishers alone are the sole judge of writing ability. If you are not published you are by definition without talent. Thanks to Simon for reminding us of that.
Stephen
If you dont like a blog, don't read it - simple as that, no further discussion necessary.