Playtime

Let us consider this [weblogger]. His [writing] is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the [reader] a little too quick. He [posts] a little too eagerly; his [words], his [responses] express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the [reader]. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his [writing] the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while [revising] his [site] with the recklessness of a tightrope-walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a slight movement of the [topic at hand]. All his behavior seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his [posts] as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a [weblogger].

The source is Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.