RTFB

I recently read “Blogging Off,” an article by Whitney Pastorek that originally appeared in The Village Voice and was reprinted in the July / August issue of Utne Reader. Whitney presents an amusing analysis of “How Blogs Are Ruining My Life” that includes “No one shows up for events anymore” (they simply post something about it in their blog, presumably with the assumption that blogging is the next best thing to being there), and “No one invites me to anything anymore” (bloggers and non-bloggers don’t mix [well] … for long). What I particularly like, though, is “No one tells me anything anymore”:

These days, I don’t even hear about the stupid stuff that’s going on — “I got a haircut” or “My apartment burned down” — because the bloggers assume that I have read about it on their blogs.

Or, in other words, Read The F***ing Blog (RTFB) … I knew it would come to this :-). Among the other humorous observations in the article are a reference to Friendster as “a gateway drug” to blogging, and a definition of the Blogging Caste System (BCS), which ranks the “fabulosity” of different types of bloggers and non-bloggers.