My family moved to Kansas when I was three. I don’t think most of my family had ever traveled west of Philadelphia, and so my trips back east were full of questions about what it was like in Kansas. Did we have cars? Air conditioning? What was there to eat?

Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of differences, but as a child the primary difference between Kansas and my relatives’ homes in New Jersey was that they had Nickelodeon, but we had MTV. I was a big fan of MTV, with its flashy graphics and edgy young adults doing things like Remote Control, which I assumed had to be very clever and funny. And when videos had computer graphics in them? I was OVER THE MOON!

MTV Disco Party, 1985

I have no insight into the mind of a child, but at some point in 1985 my brother and I spilled something. You can hear enigmatic promises about righting this wrong towards the end of the appended recording. For whatever reason, I thought that recording my version of Dire Straits’s “Money for Nothing” and presenting it to my parents would make up for our mistakes.

I should note that as a six year old, I was not aware of the deeper meaning of the song, as “real men” such as Dire Straits decry the crass commercialism of music-as-advertisements and the rise of “faggots” like Duran Duran on the image-conscious MTV. I just knew there were awesome computer graphics, and neon highlights hand-drawn onto the video of the old dudes playing guitar. In the unlikely event that I one day run for public office, I pre-emptively decry whoever pulls snippets of me saying “faggot” at the age of six for out-of-context smear ads!

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How do you attract attention to your “blog”? (I put the word in quotation marks not in an attempt to delegitimize it — it is perfectly legitimate — but to quarantine it because it is so ugly that other words should be protected from it. Were it a weaker and more vulnerable things rather than like a brutally triumphant Teuton drunkenly trampling the garments of the Vestal Virgins, it might deserve some pity. But it doesn’t.) The question remains, how do you attract attention to your “blog” when there are a hundred million others? You can concentrate on quality, fill a niche or a greater need, and invest the time, money and work to make it stand out, as many have done, although with no guarantee of success. Or, you can make it sensational, appealing to whatever it is that for obvious reasons will immediately turn our attentions from just about anything to violence, threat, insanity, or sex. That’s why television’s mainstays are dead bodies, teasingly exposed bosoms, and exploding cars. And so, in “blogging,” as in much else, begins the mad race to the bottom. Blogging’s anonymity makes it the intellectual twin of road rage. But unlike road rage it is not and cannot be subject to law. The only defense against its lowliness is to know it for what it is and call it thus.

Mark Helprin, Digital Barbarism

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