Are bloggers "a generation of compulsive self-chroniclers, a fleet of juvenile Marcel Prousts gone wild"?

Last weekend was a big weekend for discussion of blogging in the mainstream media. Tim Russert's Meet the Press devoted half the show to a sort of roundtable on blogging (which has drawn a lot of attention; Jeff Jarvis has an excellent and very thorough discussion here. And InstaPundit has more here).

I watched the program myself, and the "consensus" seemed to be that blogging consists of mostly:

In other words, blogging is inherently frivolous, right?

Pursuing the blogging-as-frivolity "meme" to its ultimate conclusion, Emily Nussbaum, writing in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, devotes five long pages (titled My So-Called Blog) to the idea that blogging is a mostly childish activity:

According to figures released last October by Perseus Development Corporation, a company that designs software for online surveys, there are expected to be 10 million blogs by the end of 2004. In the news media, the blog explosion has been portrayed as a transformation of the industry, a thousand minipundits blooming. But the vast majority of bloggers are teens and young adults. Ninety percent of those with blogs are between 13 and 29 years old; a full 51 percent are between 13 and 19, according to Perseus. Many teen blogs are short-lived experiments. But for a significant number, they become a way of life, a daily record of a community's private thoughts -- a kind of invisible high school that floats above the daily life of teenagers.

A typical page shows a dated list of entries, beginning with the most recent. Many posts are short, surrealistic one-liners: ''I just peeled a freckle off my neck. Does that mean it's not a freckle?'' Others are more like visual poems, featuring a quirky series of scanned pictures (monkeys and robots are popular), a quote from a favorite song or a link to a strange news story. Some posts consist of transcripts of instant-message conversations, posted with or without permission (a tradition I discovered when a boy copied one of our initial online conversations under the heading ''i like how older people have grammar online'').

But a significant number of writers treat their journals as actual diaries, toting up detailed accounts of their day. ''I watched the miracle of life today in bio, and it was such a huge letdown,'' read one post. ''I was expecting it to be funny and sexual but it was way too scientific for my liking, and a bit yucky too, but not as bad as people made it out to be. Although, my not being able to laugh made me feel a bit too old. Current mood: disappointed.''

''If I get a really mean comment and I go back and I look at it again, and again, it starts to bother me,'' M. told me. ''But then I think, If I delete it, everyone will know this bothers me. But if I respond, it'll mean I need to fight back. So it turns into a conflict, but it's fun. It's like a soap opera, kind of.''

It's a drama heightened by the fact that journals are linked to one another, creating a constant juxtaposition of posts among the students. For example, on LiveJournal, you can click a ''friends'' link and catch up on your friends' experiences without ever speaking, with everyone's accounts posted next to one another in a kind of word collage. For many, this transforms daily life. Teen bloggers are constantly considering how they'll turn a noteworthy moment into an online post. After a party or a concert, these accounts can amount to a prismatic portrait of the evening.

But even this endless linking only begins to touch on the complex ways these blogs are obsessively interconnected and personalized. L. has had an online journal for two and a half years, and it has morphed along with her. At first, her interest list (part of the user profile) consisted of topics like aromatherapy, yoga and Zen -- each of which linked to people with the same interest. She deleted that list and started over. In her next phase, she was obsessed with Freudian psychology. Now she lists fashion trends and belongs to the Flapper, Saucy Dwellings and Sex Tips blog rings.

There's much more (you should read the whole thing, but I can't resist sharing a few nuggets):

instant-messaged compulsively; they gossiped online

With so much confessional drama

revelations of insecurity alternate with chest-beating bombast, juvenile jokes and self-mocking claims of sexual prowess

documenting milestones (a learner's permit!), philosophical insights, complaints about parental dorkiness and plans for something called Operation Backfire

Pretty serious stuff, eh?

I guess I'm just not young enough to be offended by Ms. Nussbaum's piece. Sure, there are young people blogging about life. School sucks, parents suck, you hate your boyfriend/girlfriend, and your enemies are all dorks!

Knocking young people while trivializing blogging is easy if you just stick to the facts!

(That way you don't have to worry about bloggers your own age.)

Notwithstanding my concerns about stereotyping, I should give the Devil her due here. Ms. Nussbaum makes a good point when she asks whether the massive sharing of personal angst is necessarily good for the young people who do it:

A result of all this self-chronicling is that the private experience of adolescence -- a period traditionally marked by seizures of self-consciousness and personal confessions wrapped in layers and hidden in a sock drawer -- has been made public. Peer into an online journal, and you find the operatic texture of teenage life with its fits of romantic misery, quick-change moods and sardonic inside jokes. Gossip spreads like poison. Diary writers compete for attention, then fret when they get it. And everything parents fear is true.

Should I should sue myself (and all of my readers) for invading my privacy?

Perhaps it would be unfair to expect too much consistency from someone who called CBS's cancellation of its own series "de facto censorship."

Yeah! Emily Nussbaum knows all about de facto.

She's definitely an expert, at the very least she's "so-called."

Maybe even "kind of...."