Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Beastie: Tip of apocalyptic iceberg

There's am alarming development that I see eventually causing the breakdown of civilization as we know it.

Consider the story of Dr. Arnold Kim, physician-turned-blogger.

Sure, blogging can be emotionally rewarding and intellectually stimulating. It can also be addictive, a huge time-suck and eventually grind a person down into millions of cynical bits. Usually it produces a weird combination: the blogger doing Leonardo DiCaprio's "I'm King of the World!" on the doomed Titanic.

But there's something socially and morally wrong about Arnold Kim, who heads up MacRumors.com, the website of Apple gossip and rumor, leaving his medical practice ...to blog.

That's right. He stopped treating kidney disease, abandoning the sacred role of the healer, to practice his blogging hobby full time.

Of course, it's a lucrative website-- he can draw a six-figure salary at either job (something we at The Door know nothing about).

But as a society, can we really afford to have valuable contributors just drop everything for the brief thrill of seeing their name in print? In the past, writers and journalists toiled for years hoping they'd eventually offer as much to humankind as a doctor does on his first day out of medical school.

Forget about rising oil prices, terrorism and Brokeback Mountain. This truly fills me with dread.

Think of the consequences if this catches on. Do we want our firemen ignoring the bell just to spellcheck their latest blog entry? Homeland Security agents working on their trout fishing blog while aliens sneak into the country hassle-free? Judges turning in their robes merely to service the Internet uber-feed? Engineers fiddling with their youtube subscriptions as bridges collapse under rush hour traffic?

Someone call Sen. Grassley! This can go nowhere good. The vision is disturbing, even here in my cozy cubicle. Affected as if by the strange, deadly malaise in The Happening, people will start jumping off of buildings, texting their posts as they drop. I'm sure this is mentioned somewhere as a sign of the apocalypse.

No, better to leave blogging to the desperate and wicked social substrata of geeks and losers who currently dominate the field.

When the smart, the successful and the beautiful begin to post their opinions in the blogosphere, the real world is put in deadly peril.

And we bloggers might then have to take some responsibility for it.

LOL! As if!

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