Tuesday, December 21, 2010

I thought we could commemorate our final entry of 2010 with an actual post, first and foremost, rather than a “we’ll be back” message. Additionally, it seemed appropriate to suggest we take 15 minutes and quietly reflect on the year as choral arrangements of holiday favorites play in the background. I’m just fuckin’ with you, of course, which means I’ve already violated the other guideline for tonight–no profanity–and that effectively prevents us from ringing in the new year really classy-like.

But we can ring it in with a commitment: To do all of this, this bounty of letters you see before you, again in 2011. It isn’t hard to make this claim by any means, because we’ve built a curious contraption here, the inner workings of which I explained recently. There’s a reason why there are no ads, no commenting system, no visitor counter, and no Google Analytics installed on this site. Heck, the web statistics package furnished by GoDaddy is straight out of the ’90s and offers the online equivalent of hash marks in a prison cell, only a little uglier. We’re lean because Secondhand Rants runs on a simple calculus. I write on my own terms, largely free of your input. And then you consume or ignore the content under cover of anonymity! Imagine that.

We have, in effect, carved out our own space on the Internet, harnessing a staple of social media–blogs–and shaping it into a kind of pact. An arrangement. I despise the phrase “social media,” by the way, and should I ever employ the term in a truly earnest capacity here, I may vomit. Or tweet, as the case may be. Let us call this unique geography something else. Semi-social media. Socially obtuse media. The Silent Exchange, if we want to get creative. I’m compelled to raise a toast at this juncture, but I have no idea how many people are in the room or who exactly is sitting where. And that’s just perfect.