Ex-Seattle Weekly-ite Philip Dawdy Still Mixing It Up On The Internet

He's not raking muck for any paper publications currently, but ex-Seattle Weekly all-star Philip Dawdy is still managing to rouse the rabble on the internet. He got noticed by Reddit.com this week after making the jump from reporting to editorializing and dissing Google, MySpace, "Web 2.0" and blogs from, uh, his blog.

This yearning we've got nowadays to be actualized through an idealized self that isn't real at all, but that everyone thinks is real!, is pervasive and so deeply-enmeshed in our culture and who we are that I don't even need to cite my sources—and to the point where Time magazine, as you no doubt know, has dubbed it all a social good, a flowering of democracy, and named the You of the Web 2.0 as its "Person of the Year." (Apparently, reality took the year off—or is meta-reality, watered-down and flattened, the new reality?) I think that the social networking, YouTubery and such has its place and its uses (duh!). But the problem with it is that when real people (the flesh and blood ones) learn that they are nothing close to their hyper-idealized selves (and they will find out), then look out. Depression. Anxiety. Here come the SSRIs. This culture we have created makes us suckers for the quick fix—or, tragically, the quick end—because we are so desperate to see ourselves and our new next best friends in our perfect false world that we will take anything to get back to that sweet spot of self-actualization. We will do anything, except for the psychological grunt work that is truly required for any anti-depressant to be worth a shit in the first place.

There's a lot more and it's a great read despite the fact that he eventually winds his way into a "print journalism vs the internet" corner. Maybe an editor would have kept him on point? Welcome to the "publish" button, Philip. The Reddit community alternately shot him down or backed him up in both the comments on his site and at Reddit, but both sides have useful things to say so maybe Philip's impression of the internet will be affected by all the hate/love?