Former humourist and Daily Mail correspondent Keith Waterhouse makes friends with the blogosphere:
Seasoned googlers, of whom there is already a vast tribe, are nerds, anoraks and braces-wearers of the worst sort who spend every working moment searching the infernal engine for other people’s blogs.
They are descended from a generation of titterers, pranksters and spokespersons of the bleeding obvious who in a more primitive era used to fool around with the office photocopier, circulating allegedly humorous material (“In these days of equal rights, why is Manchester not known as Personchester”) faxed or posted to them by fellow-nerds who in turn had painfully copied the stuff from a parish magazine.
The world is now their oyster — or their lobster as they would say, stealing the joke without acknowledgment.
They never acknowledge original authorship, believing as they do that googling has outmoded the law of copyright.
Googlers and bloggers do not have an original thought between them. Their ruminations on tax reform, Europe, immigration, Iraq, security, education and the rest have already been googled ten times over by fellow bloggers copying their source material from some other blogger’s googling diatribe to the local newspaper.
Hopefully, they will google themselves out of steam, replacing their hobby with games of draughts or snakes and ladders.
I stole this story from The Register. To which it was contributed by TechDigest. What nonsense! (*cough*)
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Losely paraphrasing Thomas Kuhn in his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” when 25 scholars agree on a theoretical concept, a paradigm is born. The structure of the birth of a paradigm is when scholars are quoting each other. In some space and time, much of what they say is NOT new; it is simply re-phrasing.
Much of your descriptions of googlers and bloggers, mimic what Thomas Kuhn observed. Bloggers and googlers are not necessarily “scholars” but language is constructed around these repetitions.