I Love Op-Eds III (Yet Another One About Pr0n!)

In the previous installment of my current serious I Love Op-Eds, we came across a funny Op-Ed that was pr0nographic. In today's episode, we'll explore yet another comely Op-Ed. It involves pr0n as well. I love sexed-up op-eds...

Blogs: A medium in search of a role
By Koh Buck Song
For The Straits Times

MORE people are becoming agog about blogs. But this frenzied excitement will subside to a new equilibrium sooner than expected. For instance, last week's conviction of two bloggers in Singapore for posting racist remarks online is just the latest development to knock the wind out of the sails of the blogging euphoria. [1] This is, indeed, an age in which anyone with access to the Internet can say anything to everyone else on the planet... But the litmus test will always be: Who will listen? How to gain and sustain a big enough audience?
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I think the more important questions have to do with durability and enduring value - how long they can last, and what special service they can continue to offer. First, durability. Blogs that make it big depend on other 'content aggregators' to give them that push into fame among the less digitally active segments of the population. Without key content aggregators in the mainstream media - like this newspaper - it will always be harder to achieve a tipping point in galvanising action. [2]
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Blogs are generating such a buzz now mainly because of their novelty value. [3] But as more blogs are set up, their scarcity value will drop. Like all other modes of communication before, they become victims of their own success. Remember when websites first came upon the firmament? People thought they would revolutionise the world, so they invested money in dotcoms. We all know what happened after that... Now, what about value?
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Successful blogs today work on one of two main business models: that of Donald Trump or Annabel Chong, the Singaporean girl who moved to the United States and made headlines by breaking a world record in a pornographic act... [4] Mr Trump's approach - that 'there is no such thing as over-exposure' - succeeds because the author is already famous; that is, what is sought-after is the message, not the medium. Ms Chong's model was to throw caution, clothes and all else to the wind. But where is she now? The market for attention, like human beings, is driven by three things: money, sex and power. Mr Trump is money; Ms Chong is sex. For me, the best way blogs can contribute to society is to serve as whistle-blowers against any abuse of power... [5]
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Blogs may soon become just another marketing channel for the Donald Trumps and Annabel Chongs of this world... [6]

Now, in the first sentence, 'aGog' means excited and very interested to find out something. I didn't know this before...

[1-3] are the usual things used to... uh... 'discredit' blogs. Key talking points: fame, euphoria, novelty. These are still quite OK. Things turn unbelievably weird a short while later...

At [4,6], Koh thinks that successful blogs work on two business models: 'over-exposure' Trump, and 'sexed-up' Chong. Now, I've mentioned before that it's really so bizarre to equate pr0n with blogs. I mean, almost no reasonable person would do this. And here and the previous op-ed, we have two instances of a senior editor and writer doing exactly this! So my question is: why/how/where did this association come from?!

My answer is simple: there's no answer, simply because there's no logic to it. It's loosely similar to classical conditioning on a totally strange scale.

This is how it works. We normally have a negative reaction such as disgust when we see words that refer to pr0n. That's just natural. Now, the trick is to present 'pr0n' and 'blogs' at the same time. In a short while, every time someone sees 'blogs', he or she will subsequently have a reaction of 'disgust' (and all ancillary reactions to 'pr0n'). It's really quite a powerful effect.

Does it work? Yes, I think it will work. It would be even better if the initial pairing (pr0n->disgust) was bizarre enough to prevent further inquiry for a person reading this op-ed.

For example, if we equate blogs with kids' homework (for the purpose of making blogs look like amateurish enterprises), people might say, "Oh, that sounds cute, perhaps it's good for kids to blog; it'll just be like doing homework." So, 'homework->not so extreme reaction' is not bizarre enough; this will backfire because more people will then blog.

On the other hand, let's associate blogs with pr0n. A person might then say, "Wow, pr0n! That's really something! Hmm... so since the newspaper is linking blogs and pr0n together, there must be some truth in it. I'll just accept this since there's no way for me to verify whether this is reasonable or not as I don't know enough about the pr0n industry. Better safe than sorry!"

I find this way to 'discredit' blogs to be quite elegant. The classical conditioning stuff works, make no mistake about it. Say it enough times, and people shall believe it. In the meantime, I'm still trying to get some sort of euphoria as I end today's entry. Maybe I'll get it when [5]'s done...