Next thing you know, people are going to be using cars to drive, and coffee makers to make coffee, and windows to check the weather outside

So I guess there was this thing going on last night:

Housing Works Bookstore and The National Book Critics Circle bring you a panel on blogging and book reviewing, with a discussion about what happens when the two intersect.

Oh boy. There's a recap of the event over at the Critical Mass blog. Oh god, I feel a migraine and some naughty language coming up after the block quote:

For all the talk about the separateness of blogging and print reviews, the panel came to the conclusion that these mediums are essentially engaged in a single (growing) conversation about books -- and blogs have merely made that conversation more visible, providing not just new points of view, but an ever expanding amount of information sites like this one or Moorishgirl.com which link to and comment upon book pages from around the world.

Oh man. Did you people really need a fucking panel to tell you that? Hell. Where's my Advil.

People, let me lay it out for you: The Internet is nothing more than a medium for communication. Blogs are nothing more than people communicating with other people. There is nothing inherently special about blogs. Some people, they got together and invented computers, and then some other people found a way to make those computers "inter-connect" with each other in a sort of "network" so that information could be passed between them, and then everybody else on the planet got together and said, "Hey, let's use this technology for the purpose it was created for," and they did so, and then there were blogs.

That's it. That's the whole story. And now the conversation is over. Know why? Because I just ended it. Because there's nothing left to say. Sure there's details that may have been left out of this Intro To Blogging 101 course--but it's all just a matter of execution, and is really only of interest to people who are going to create their own blogs. Then you need to know about Technorati and search engines and how these things actually function in a technical sense. As for how they function in a communicative or a "higher" sense? There's nothing left of interest to say: if you can read, if you can consume and process information, you can see what blogs do.

So now we can all get on with our lives, secure in the knowledge that there's nothing all that special about blogs, safe in the recognition that we can stop acting like we're all engaged in some kind of intellectual turf war, and we can all put our egos back in our little ego boxes and go about doing what we do best, which is engaging in communication. Whether on the Internet or by telephone or television or newspaper or over coffee at the coffee shop or by Pony Fucking Express.

I'm not saying we don't live in interesting times. We do. I'm just saying there's nothing surprising about why they're interesting.

Now can I get my Advil please?