Blog crushes explained

Over at Crescat and elsewhere, there's a big discussion about blog social life--how is it that people have crushes on bloggers or blogs, when these things are, you know, on the computer?

There's the obvious answer--how do people have crushes on celebrities, characters from books, etc.? They just do.

But it seems to me that a crush on a blogger is, in a lot of ways, a perfect crush. You have a limited amount of information about your object of desire, and that information has been carefully selected by the object of desire so as to make him- or herself appear as intelligent and thoughtful as possible.  Also, whereas with a real-life crush, you find the person attractive but go on to idealize his or her appearance, with a blog crush you start from nothing (unless, that is, you have a thing for Matthew Yglesias, whose face his readers are surely familiar with). This is all the more true of anonymous bloggers, whose names cannot be plugged into friendster, facebook or the Google image search by the curious. Guest-blogging on Crescat, Milbarge admits that, "Maybe it's true that if I met them, I would see something that turned me off them and destroyed the crush." Of course he would. That's what makes blog crushes such a good idea.

All you've got, in the case of the law/libertarian/political sorts of blogs, is the casual and personal yet at times op-ed like rantings of some generally intelligent people, the sort of people you might know but don't, giving bloggers a girl- or boy-next-door quality not shared by most celebrities or characters in novels. (People like Eugene Volokh and his co-conspirators or Daniel Drezner are celebrities in the blogosphere but are barely even in the category Wonkette calls "famous for Washington").

So, from the sketchy outline you have of a blogger, you can project the fabulous crush-person you've always dreamed of liking from a distance. That's it for my explanation for blog crushes.