Old media semantics
Douglas Gray wrote a wonderfully concise piece about what you could call ‘the blog stereotype’ a little while ago that I thought I should mention. The subject of his commentary is this article by Edward Champion, which is actually not concerned with blogs at all, but with the fact - surprise, surprise - that you might find having a blog quite convenient if you happen to be a famous (or at least notorious) exhibitionist. That, and Champion needs to consult a dictionary. As Gray notes:
The number of stereotypes and sweeping generalizations Champion manages to compress into the opening paragraphs of the article is truly dazzling. If only he’d taken the time to consult an undergraduate-level textbook on modern literature, he might have also gotten some of his terminology right.
The “confessional” writers were a movement of poets (primarily) who in the 1950s and 1960s began treating an autobiographical “I” as the primary subject of the work, delving with stark frankness into emotional and sexual experiences in a way that violated previous taboos about what constituted proper poetic material.
Champion conflates confessional material with introspection, though they are not the same thing at all. T.S. Eliot, for example, was a deeply introspective poet, but he avoided personal revelations in his own work. I’ve heard it argued that Anne Sexton, one of the leading confessional poets, was herself not terribly introspective.
Of course, among other things, introspection is also a scientific methodology. For example, to decide whether or not a sentence is grammatical a syntactician may resort to introspection, i.e. his intuitive judgment. Obviously that has very little to do with him revealing his private secrets to the general public. In fact, if you look at linguistic blogs you’ll find disappointingly little outrageous personal revelations. Heck, if you ask Google what introspection means it becomes quite clear that it’s not the same as exhibitionism. This journalist is in need of a plain old dictionary, it seems.