Oorgo

blogs and bumper stickers

As I was heading home last night I saw a couple of bumper stickers that made me shake my head, one was "Marriage = " a cartoon man + cartoon woman (y'know, the ones from the public washroom doors) and another was something about guns and liberals. Last night I was also browsing through a swack of blogs, and was amazed at the amount of political, right-wing conservative and/or pro-gun and/or "anti-pc" and/or one or two left-wing blogs. I started to think of how these two things go together, blogs and bumper stickers.

Are blogs the 21st century version of, or in some way the evolution of the bumper sticker? It's definitely a bandwagon thing in many cases, one person gets a sticker, their friend sees it, they put it on their car, etc. etc. Now it's the same thing with blogs, we see a link, link to it and link link link etc.

Bumper stickers were/are used to convey mostly strong feelings about certain things whether political, environmental, emotional, or of course comedic, bizarre, and radio station stickers. Blogs fall right in line there too: you have funny blogs, family blogs, bizarre story blogs, ranting anti-this-or-that blogs.

Bumper stickers when applied en masse become invisible and meaningless, just like some of the icons, images and stories across blogland: how many times do you actually look at sidebar icons? Things are funny/interesting the first 2 or 3 times then boring or annoying the next 30,000. Reading the same story or different rants all saying basically the same thing adds up to following a van with the bumper sticker "Get in shut up hold on".

Posted by Oorgo at June 8, 2005 12:29 PM