Bugger Blooker

Note: to singaporeans, the following idea is delivered with the literal aid of 1022 words.  That, I suppose, is approximately 1000-words-too-many for the all-too-average average singaporean – let alone the fact that it contains ideas that do not (God/s forbid!) pertain to eating, shopping or anything trite or trivial.  However, you can go here or here for that which will probably interest you.

 Ask yourself one thing.  Do you think that 'blooker' prize winners would have won the 'Booker' prize?  If not, why?

The problem with 'blooker' and 'blooker'-like awards..

…is that they do not award the production of quality material per se, but proffer such accolades to those who have produced good stuff within the category of 'bloggers'.  This is not unlike awards given to children in their early years in school.  Whilst they are still encouraged to progress and create more than that which they have been given awards for previously – which implies that what they do is never good enough in view of what they could do when compared to ‘adults’ – in the case of 'bloggers', it simply serves to entrench them in whatever perspectival skills it took to produce what they have produced as their developmental path is portrayed to end at the wall dividing them from the ‘upper-class’ of the intellectual and non self-publishing world.  In other words, they, in their categorical locality as ‘bloggers’, are deemed to have scaled the pinnacle of their potential as creative and thinking human beings.  They, in other words, become the ‘pros’ within ‘amateur culture’ whilst oblivious to the fact that they are awarded for professionalism within amateurism.  This, in effect, creates a new category of professional amateurs whom, made oblivious to the fact that they are amateurs by such awards, do not aspire to more.  Thus, the future ‘dumbing down’ of ‘bloggers’ is secured.

 
Previously,

…there were the ‘professionals’, the ‘amateurs’ and the ‘unskilled’.  The people of the latter two categories were still cognizant of the former as that worthy of emulation.  Now, the lines between the ‘pros’ and ‘amateurs’ are rigidified and a new conception of ‘what is the best’ has been defined (specifically for ‘bloggers’), located and circumscribed within an ‘amateur’ (‘blogger’) field that does little to goad them into emulating those within the hierarchically superior ‘professional’ category, for they, as ‘bloggers’, denizens of the realm of ‘amateur culture’, can be ‘professionals’ in their own, albeit superficial, right as well.  The masses are thus kept from scaling the thus increasingly heightened walls that blinker their thus intellectually ‘proletarianised’ senses.  They have become ‘a class conscious of themselves as a class’ whilst accepting their inferior locale beneath the professional class above them and seeking superiority within their diminutive position.

 
All subsequent ‘blooker’-style awards are given for variety in superficial produce as opposed to their having transcended the intellectual and perspectival state from whence previous produce emerged and was awarded.  This, in effect, imposes a perspectival ceiling on the ‘blogging’ world and limits and entrenches their developmental potential to and within the ‘preschool’ of the intellectual world.  'Blooker' and 'blooker'-style awards basically congratulate the masses for what they do whilst keeping in their place as the underclass of the intellectual world – last year’s award went to the author of a ‘blook’ entitled, ‘My Year of Cooking Dangerously’ which ‘beat the intimate diary of a prostitute and a guide to the UK's best "greasy spoon" cafes to take the Blooker Prize’.  One can be assured that established writers will never be given such recognition if they produced work of what is fast becoming defined as bloggerial calibre.  Thus the intellectual childhood of the blogger is perpetuated.

 
"Blooks are the new books, a hybrid literary form at the cutting edge of both literature and technology," said Bob Young, founder of self-publishing site Lulu which organised and sponsored the prize.

What Bob Young actually means is that ‘blooks’ are ‘a hybrid literary form at the cutting edge of’ non-upper (intellectual) class literature.  How, pray tell, can the ‘intimate diary of a prostitute’, or a ‘guide to UK’s best greasy spoon cafes’, or ‘misadventures in the kitchen’ be considered to be located on the ‘cutting-edge of literature’?  How do they compare with, for instance, Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf, Ngugi wa thiong’o, Rousseau, Marx, J.S. Mill, Marcuse, and so on?  ‘Bloggers’ would say, “we are not trying to be great philosophers or thinkers, duh!”  What else would they say when they are awarded and validated for superficial produce consistently by the intellectual ‘bourgeois’?  I would say that there is nothing wrong with talking about mundane issues, but there is no reason why this can’t be done intelligently.  But mind you, do so, and you’re not going to be nominated for ‘blookers’ because you have forgotten your place in their scheme of things.  These are the produce of minds located and validated for the (inferior) perspectival locale they are currently interned within.  Thus, 'blooker' awards may be seen as little more than a condescending pat on the head of the great unthinking blogging masses desperate for prominence brought about by life within a self-nullifying system by the upper echelons of the hierarchically-ordered Intellectual Sphere.

The best kind of awards..

…are those that spur one to achieve more (vertically), but which simultaneously incites the winner along a developmental path that ought to see her/im viewing the produce that had previously received the said awards as insignificant and evidence of a relatively superficial mind.  Such awards imply that what one has achieved is ‘good’ in view of one’s prior stage of maturity but not ‘good’ in terms of higher levels of maturity.  All that the absence of such forward-thinking awards will bring about, I’m afraid, is the institutionalisation and perpetuation of idiocy and the rigidification of the boundaries delineating the upper and lower classes of the intellectual world.  It will reinforce the perspectival tendencies of most ‘bloggers’ and lead to their emulation of ‘the best’ amongst the intellectual underclass.  ‘Bloggers’ must realise that they can be as good, or even better, not when compared to those inhabiting the self-publishing blogosphere, but to those patrolling the watchtowers along the borders delineating the ‘blogger’ and ‘intellectual’ world and who have the audacity to award them for being less than what they could be.  Till then, ‘blooker’-style awards, by their ability to determine what ‘bloggers’ ought to be via their reinforcement of what they are through the said awards, basically herd, corral and pen all new entrants into the ‘blogosphere’ within a perspectival scheme that will eventually have them ‘bloggered’, ‘tagged’ and ready for underdevelopment.

 
Now how about giving this article a ‘blooker’ eh?

ed-infinitum

bbc: 2006 blooker winners

bbc: Amateur culture

bbc: Blooker prize honours Best Blogs 2007

Lulu blooker prize

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