ATTENTION WHORES. "Web Hookups Blamed for Rise in AIDS" reads a headline out of the National HIV Prevention Conference and based on the new CDC numbers. You know, I do believe that a lot of the stuff people in this medium are saying about weblogs -- the kind of triumphalism I'm always dismissing -- is really based on the immense flood of traffic drawn by people's need to connect on more primal levels.

Even here I am happy to be linked, as 'twere, to like-minded blatherers -- I'm always pleased to be cited, answered, blogrolled. I believe the internet is really driven by a hunger for connection, and if you just look at the political weblog piece of it, you're missing the bigger picture. Behind most of the allegedly political, ideological, and journalistic impulses given for the weblog phenomenon are several millions of lonelinesses looking for surcease, a sign that someone feels as we feel. I strongly feel it when I scrawl (or post to) the comments sections of allegedly political weblogs -- that canker of isolation begging the balm of electronic contact.

This doesn't negate the good sense spoken by some of us, or even the nonsense spoken by others. But I think it should provide context for the exorbitant claims sometimes made for this little patch of public discourse. The desire to be heard (or to share on a grosser, in the Elizabethan sense, level) drives so strong that we should take it with a grain of salt, or sense.

It ill becomes me to say so, but if you haven't figured it out already (and you probably have), I'm a bit of an attention whore. I would suggest that most of the opinion vendors hereabouts tend that way, too.

"We are arrant knaves, all of us; believe none of us; to a nunnery, go!" Hamlet had that much right.