Tuesday, January 18, 2005
(1:13 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Obsolete Print Publications
Waiting for the cable guy this morning, I had plenty of time to catch up on the Atlantic Monthly. This particular issue contained Richard Clarke's fictional account of the future history of the War on Terror, James Fallows' scathing critique of current homeland security policy and proposals for getting our priorities in order, an essay on the Tribune's new advice columnist and a personal history of the encounter between a meritocrat and the world of Ivy League prestige -- together with a series of articles about the supposed "division" of American society, many book reviews, etc., etc., etc.I did not link to any of those articles, as you will note, even though some are likely freely available online. I'm sure that Josh Marshall et al. have already commented extensively on most of them, weeks ago. I'm also sure that their comments were swallowed whole by most of their readers, who will never personally read the articles in question -- which is fine, really. I don't mind the instantaneous shallowness of the blogosphere, although I am resolving to cut back on visits to Atrios's site. I do, however, want to carve out a space, at least in my own life, for useless reading, for the long articles that I may or may not ever talk about with anyone. I'll admit it: as I read, I often mentally highlighted paragraphs I might type into my window and share with the world, but I resisted the impulse. Not everything has to be part of the relentless flow of information; some stuff can ferment in the back of one's minds for years, until perhaps a conversation arises in which one can say, "You know, I remember something from an article I read in the New Yorker a couple years ago, I think it was by Seymour Hersh."
Hardt and Negri have taught me to be suspicious of the urge to carve out little islands of sanity, so perhaps leaving the print articles in the biosphere rather than the blogosphere, for what are finally moral reasons, is not the answer -- perhaps the answer is to blog in such a way as to dig up those old fragments, to reinject the "I think I read somewhere" into the flow. If blogging is to replicate the genuine spontenaity of "natural" communication, it must somehow distance itself from the tyrrany of the new, while not indulging in arbitrary moral judgments of the new that disregard the tremendous potential that unrestrained information flows unleash.
