Wednesday, September 29, 2004
(3:03 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Prolegomena to Any Future Meta-Blogging
Amardeep has posted some of his sociological observations on the blogging world. His notions of an "inflection point" (where you start getting blogrolled by a lot more people and don't have to reciprocate any more) and an "affiliation group" (a potential circle-jerk of blogs, similar to the old UWC circle or the group of blogs centered, for me, on Infinite Thought [another blog may be the "real" center, but she seems to be to me]) are very helpful. His thoughts on the question of whether a group blog is really a blog are troubling:He counts The Weblog among those group blogs, but we have yet to reach the point of a really "live" feel -- we've hit it for a few days at a time sometimes, but we have yet to get to a level where there are consistently posts from more than one person, every day. (I post almost every day, and Anthony has recently been posting several times a week -- having a third person join in [ahem... Robb] would probably get us to a consistent two-post-a-day level.) Also, comments seem to have slowed down recently, even as traffic continues to grow. I don't have numbers to back up the former statement, but that's just how it feels. Overall, I don't know if my experience of group blogging has consistently fit in with Amardeep's scheme -- perhaps The Weblog is an example of mixed genres (partly my own personal blog or even sometimes journal, and partly a "public" group blog).
However, as much as I enjoy visiting them, in my view group blogs operate by different rules than other blogs. I see them as the latest chapter in a long, evolving tradition of internet sociality, which began -- back in the day -- with BBSes, then evolved more recently into web chat rooms, ICQ, Instant Messaging, etc. Group blogs live and die by rules that relate more with those other social systems than regular blogs do. A group blog might have a crisis if a member writes something that causes others to quit. Or it might simply run out of ideas and steam as its members move onto new interests. But the group blogs I've been reading use the diversity of their member's experiences and knowledge-base to create surprising longevity and large-scale popularity.
On a related note: I understand that there's been a lot of metablogging lately, what with the merchandising and the stat summary and all that. (à Gauche has some remarks that are pertinent, though difficult to excerpt.) It's fun to do the meta-blogging stuff, and a lot of times it gets people involved in discussion, but sometimes I write posts that, while extremely gratifying, are also extremely draining. I have mixed feelings about watching those posts fall off the bottom of the page, likely never to be read again. I think of all the stuff that I've written on here that, while available in principle, will probably never see the light of day, and part of me, the archivist of myself, rebels -- but for another person, it's freeing. I never want to reach the point, already reached by some celebrity bloggers, where I just shit out three posts a day without any concern for grammar, logic, or insight. The place I probably want to be is between that point and the point of utter perfectionism, of wanting everything I write to be the best thing I've ever written.
And I'll be honest: I hate writing about politics anymore. There seems to be nothing positive on the horizon, and I've already said all I want to say about the negative. It seems like even if John Kerry manages to get elected, our nation's political discourse will only grow more toxic and our flagrant disregard for social and economic justice will only increase. I don't want to write about that. I am a negative person by nature, but there's only so much complaining that I can do. There's only so many times I can say, "Here they go again...." The Bush Administration is horribly corrupt -- if you're not convinced of it now, you won't ever be. It represents a moral flaw not to be able to see their collosal corruption, and moral deficiencies are not amenable to reasoned argument or empirical evidence. And if we get rid of them, John Kerry may very well find it impossible to govern. Do you want to write about that? Do you want to talk about how our nation, which was always a brutal hegemon, is actually somehow getting worse? Do you want to live in a country where people are even talking about instituting a draft to fight a war we didn't need to fight in the first place? Where George W. Bush's stonewalling and ignorant repetitiousness are counted as "debating skills" with which the highly educated and knowledgable John Kerry will have trouble competing? Where 40% of the population is totally blind and the media is giving a free hand to those who would blind the other 60%?
I'm in a class on Paul's letter to the Romans, and I keep seeing the parallel to today's circumstances. Paul thought that Jesus was coming back to overthrow the Empire and make the world whole again -- now those who believe Jesus is coming back are among the foremost willing dupes of imperial power. So where do we turn? Is there anything to be done in America? Or do we just wait for the barbarian hordes to overrun us, as they inevitably will, and sit back and take it, knowing that we deserve it -- that we were among the rich men who couldn't quite lose enough weight to fit through the eye of a needle.
