I was listening to “The BS Report with Bill Simmons” (which is a redundancy since the “BS” is a word play on his initials) and Chuck Klosterman was on, talking about how bloggers and twitterrers say stuff on the internet and think they’re so important because a few people really like what they have to say and make them feel important.

I haven’t read a lot of Chuck Klosterman, but isn’t his deal essentially that he is a guy who writes a lot of essays about stuff in pop culture and writes theories about what they mean that totally overdraw from his observations?  Isn’t it weird to go after bloggers for not deserving their sense of relevance?

Klosterman seems to be advancing a procedural view of relevance.  He is more relevant than bloggers because he is applauded by the approriate channels through which one is awarded relevance.

Bloggers might respond that a better version of relevance would be a correctness theory, though not in the strictest sense.  Certainly to be relevant artistically or as a provacatuer does not require some empirical test, but we might say something about rasing the right sorts of questions, psuhing the right sorts of buttons in our social conscience, etc.  It seems like bloggers have just as much a chance to be relevant on these grounds as a writer for Esquire.