Podcaster Charlie from 2012: Does the Blogosphere Look This Crazy?

I have to admit it: I have a secret passion for disaster movies and this is the category of movies that will invariably get me to a movie theatre – even if everything else I can watch on DVD from the comfort of my sofa at home. So I’ve been looking forward to watching 2012 since I first saw the trailer – and we headed to a theatre this past Saturday after it had been released in Russia on Thursday.

The theatre was unusually crowded and we spent about half an hour in line only to get the tickets – though this discomfort was compensated to me by the overall experience and by seeing my current Sony Vaio laptop being in use by all the heads of all countries in 2012 – which was a pleasure for a geek.

If you are already wondering why I am bragging about a movie on this normally tech blog, I have an explanation to you – and this is definitely something I’d want every blogger watching the movie in the coming weeks think about. The reason is the character of Woody Harrelson, the crazy podcaster and visionary Charlie Frost.

I don’t want to spoil the experience for everyone who is yet to watch the movie, so I will only tell that Charlie is the character explaining that the end of the world is near to the lead protagonist after he researches everything and covers over the years on his website that he also fully designs himself to provide some visual representation to the pending disaster (and the very childish-looking animation is an additional reason to be proud for him).

But unfortunately everyone thought he was insane – until his predictions actually came true. To me watching him talk and demonstrate his knowledge was fascinating because he seemed to be an incarnation for everything that people laugh about in the citizen journalists: no one wanted to believe everything he was bragging about, he was badly seeking attention and everyone around him thought he was insane – and this picture was solidified by his virtual presence and his real-life behavior.

The worst part was when he was crying out in the middle of the deadly eruption standing on a hill turning volcano and reminding people remember that they first heard about this all from Charlie – even despite of the fact that there will soon be no one on Earth to remember his predictions at all and he himself won’t be able to enjoy the fame. And at that moment I could not help but think: do I really look anything similar from outside?

What I am trying to say is that many of us in the blogosphere probably feel pretty comfortable working from our home offices (oftentimes in our pajamas), some of us never going outside for days in a row and only communicating to people online – unless we are lucky to have a dog that needs to be walked or live with a family we can talk to at least in the mornings and in the evenings.

But anyway when you spend the vast majority of your time online communicating to people in the same tech blogging (or entrepreneurial) crowd, you tend to begin thinking that everyone in this world behaves very similar to the way you do. You know, my husband once jokingly compared me to a beet-root because I am hidden from the world all the time under the ground (in my home office) with only the leaves sticking out in the form of my blog on Profy. And while it is definitely not the most pleasing of comparisons, it definitely rings true to a certain extent.

I know that many of the traditional news outlets venturing online with their own blogs have made blogs themselves look more professional (as they are written by professional journalists) but it does not change the image of a normal blogger or citizen journalists who is considered to be an attention-seeking mentally-disordered person dressed in some crazy clothes no one in their right mind would have even thought about wearing and doing all their work from behind their computer in a very strange room that could definitely take some cleaning. Now if this is the public opinion of a blogger, I’d really want to look more civilized – though I have no idea how I myself could achieve it.