Okay so from 2002 to 2005 or so I was active here on RobHolecko.com, and I would post articles, and they'd be funny and people would make comments and they'd be funny. Usually I'd complain about something or make a witty (or as Bill O'Reilly would say, "pithy") remark about something that was on the news, or more usually, I'd complain about the people I'd encounter working my job...
And I later added the watercooler, where others could email me stuff and I'd post it up there and we'd all comment on it, and we'd all laugh, and then we'd get back to work.
Then after awhile I got tired of doing it. I didn't run out of things to say, (in fact I had a great observation about Rachel Maddow about a month or so ago but I'll just leave that for another time.) but I did get kind of tired of saying them. I mean, what was the point? Everybody's got their own opinions. Was it just a mere exercise in egotistic futility to post them on an eponymous website? Was I just another attention whore on this here internet, wanting to grab my shiny little piece of everybody's attention?
Why should anybody care what I had to say anyway? Who am I, just another underachieving loser, looking to grind my axe of public outrage, making observations that anyone else could make, the only difference being that I was such a loser that I'd actually take the time to sit down and write them and post them to the web? Was I narcissistic? Self-absorbed? Egotistical? Delusional? Egotistical with delusions of grandeur? How about obsessive? Obsessive-compulsive? Obsessive compulsive personality disorder? How about social anxiety disorder? How about....uh, wait a minute...I was talking about RobHolecko.com, not all of the other things that are wrong with me. I mean allegedly...
Australian Andrew Keen made that exact argument, that today's culture has been ruined by so called amateurs:
"On today's self-publishing internet, nobody knows if you're a dog, a
monkey or the Easter bunny. That's because everyone else is too busy
ego-casting, too immersed in the Darwinian struggle for mind-share, to
listen to anyone else. But we can't blame this sad state of affairs on
some other species. We human beings hog the limelight on this new stage
of democratised media. We are simultaneously its amateur writers, its
amateur producers, its amateur technicians and, yes, its amateur
audience. Amateur hour has arrived and the audience is running the
show." - Andrew Keen, The Australian link
Amateur!?! How dare he?
![]() I was picturing the Niles Crane 'How Dare He!?!' reaction from the episode where Frederic was in the spelling bee, but I could only find this one. |
But long before he made that comment, I had quit writing at RobHolecko.com anyway. (okay "blogging". It's not like I'd introduce myself as a writer. Ahem. Well, only once.) I also quit working at Domino's in the last couple months. I wasn't really making a lot of money there part-time and really over the last year or so my main reason for going there was to have an audience, but the whole "Rob" routine was starting to get old. |
But on Facebook, as well as the new twitter fad (and that's what these are, fads) people make short little snippets of observations. They don't sit down and write long articles like this one. They 'tweet' or 'blurb.' "It's raining and I'm getting wet!" "Go Celtics! Can't wait for tonight's Game 7, they're going to kick the Magic's butts." (sorry, Stan) But nobody blogs anymore. Blogging is so 2004.
But so now it's 2009 and we've got Facebook, and everybody can post their own pithy comments about life...and we can each comment on each other's pages, it's sort of like everyone's Facebook page is their own RobHolecko.com. I can even RSS feed my RobHolecko.com posts (assuming I start making them again) right here on my wall at Facebook. It's like RobHolecko.com 2.0.
I don't even have to rely on people finding RobHolecko.com on the internet, they can have RobHolecko.com come right to them on their Facebook. (No, sorry I don't twitter, yet.)
I feel like I was a pioneer, of sorts.
It took 34 years, but I see now that I guess everyone just wanted to be me...
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