Jim Elve of BlogsCanada gets into moderately high dudgeon over a book about "lonely bloggers."

An excerpt: (here's the CP story on CTV.ca)

(The U of Calgary's Michael) Keren says, "...despite their excessive use of words, they conquer nothing. In the blogosphere, the death of an aging cat is on the same emotional level as an earthquake in Pakistan."

Huh?

In the wake of natural disasters like the Bam earthquake, the Indonesian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, bloggers rallied to help raise awareness of the human suffering and to promote personal donations to NGOs and relief agencies.

Anyone who has paid the least bit of attention to politics and the Internet should be aware of the pivotal role blogging and online fundraising played in propelling a previously unknown Howard Dean to within a hair's breadth of the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004.

Of course, there are bloggers who share their personal lives and mourn the loss of a beloved pet. To suggest that the blogosphere, in general, puts the death of a cat on the same level as the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent human beings is too insulting for much response. Suffice it to say, bloggers come from all parts of society and represent the same spectrum of human emotion as society, in general.

Actually, Jim sent me an e-mail, in part to inquire why my blog's RSS feed was down and about said article. Here's part of what I wrote back:

Are there lonely bloggers? Sure.

 

Is blogging the cause of that loneliness? No.

 

In many cases, being a teenager is the problem. I particularly feel for kids who are in geographical places where they don't fit culturally (think of a goth kid in Nowhere, Manitoba). In that cases, I hope that blogging and other online media can help them transcend the barriers of distance, reach out and find like-minded others. Having a cyber-friend you can relate to is better than no friend at all.

 

However, a cruel reality of blogging is that if you're writing a deeply personal blog and you don't have a very interesting life, your chances of a big readership are slim indeed.

 

In that sense, the blogosphere is much like the real world. Extroversion is rewarded.

Was Eleanor Rigby a blogger?" asked an accompanying press release, referring to the 1966 Beatles song in which the eponymous character picks rice off the floor after a wedding, stares wistfully out a church window and eventually dies.

In short, Keren claims in Blogosphere: The New Political Arena, bloggers are lonely. It's an angle that what some blogs derisively refer to as the "mainstream media" have zeroed in on. "Author laments lonely life of bloggers," the Globe's headline crowed. Canada.com was blunter: "Calgary author says bloggers a lonely bunch unlikely to change the world."

The article then goes on to address some of Keren's other points, that bloggers are delusional, triumphalist word terrorists. The article also pointed out the range of bloggers, from raging conservative pundits to quirky collectors of movie trailers.

Clearly, these people and their blogs have almost nothing in common. But the promotional materials and media coverage of Keren's book are having none of that.

"I don't want to be a prophet of gloom," the author has insisted. "But many are writing a sermon that no one is going to hear."

That's another Eleanor Rigby reference, in case you missed it. With a book to sell, Keren evidently has a way with words to generate controversy. But those with less to gain from disparaging the blogosphere might do well to view blogs as they do newspapers, magazines and talk radio - as a medium, not the message.