Why Gawker Is So Wrong About Virginia Heffernan’s Book Proposal
(I was just going to comment this on this absolutely WRONG post on Gawker but I read the other comments and, uh, you know, pearls before swine, so I’m putting it here instead.)
Hamilton, love ya, but have you actually read The Medium or any of Virginia Heffernan’s other work? We’ve all had two whole years to suspend our initial knee-jerk reaction to the concept of a column about the internet in a newspaper (displayed here today in this post and by everyone who has commented so far) and actually READ the thing and realize that it’s actually amazing that someone out there who actually understands the internet is thinking about it all the time. And not the way we think about it, as bloggers (people to whom the internet affords no pleasures anymore) but as a thoughtful writer who only has to write one column per week and thus can go down the kind of rabbit holes most bloggers, with ten deadlines per day or whatever, can only dream of. When was the last time anyone *who is actually a good writer*, *who actually knows the internet*, had the time to examine it with any kind of thoughtfulness? Like, never! Literally never! They’re all too busy blogging! To read the Medium each week is to live vicariously through someone who actually has the time to ruminate and luxuriate in the medium in which most writers, for the most part, either resentfully toil or don’t understand.
These fragments of a book proposal would sound ugh out of context but there is a context, and it’s Virginia Heffernan’s body of work so far, which shows she’s more than up to this totally ambitious task. Here are the archives of The Medium. Judge for yourself: http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/h/virginia_heffernan/index.html (Full disclosure: I’ve met Virginia three times in six years. This bit of indignation is based completely on her writing.)
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