SummerGrrl Phenomenon Perfectly Described
I was reading Why Web Journals Suck (found via Metapop), and she described what I’ve been bitching about perfectly. The SummerGrrl phenomenon…
The Perky Ones: A writer (usually female) who’s chipper about everything and everyone and usually dots her i’s with a heart and has pictures of unicorns on every page. Everything’s just keen and they want to cuddle with their dog Fluffy and write about how great everything is. Amazingly cloying.
Thank you! You’ve said it. These are the same sort of people who buy those green ‘hairy’ pencil cases and fill them with multi-coloured gel pens and enjoy watching Legally Blonde 2. These are the people who think Sabrina the Witch is “kinda cool”.
Women’s writing is elevated on the web - whether it be pleasant, cynical or revolutionary. All forms of women’s writing are coming out on the Internet, but this type is so saturated with saccharin, so overblown and expressionless that I can’t read a word of it without gasping for clean air and a glass of water. Unfortunately, they are so plentiful and with the AOL Journals facility soon to come online, it seems that Blogdex, LiveJournal and Feedster are going to get swamped with unelected EmpressGrrls and other sugar-lipped voiceless darlings.
With all our high talk of Internet publishing democratisation and giving voices to the mute, we failed to account for the ‘signal-to-noise’ ratio inherent in higher forms of communication. In all but a few blogs, the comments and posts have been of unbelievably high-quality. Perhaps the installation routines for weblogging software (hardly the pinnacle of complexity) provides just the required ‘test’ for keeping the signal-to-noise ratio down.
Oh well, what with this and Kottke’s recent “takeover” by the Great Unwashed, it looks like weblogging was fun - while it lasted.
