Monday, October 24, 2005
(8:42 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
What calls for blogging?
I don't know if I can keep posting every day, at least not if I want to maintain any kind of quality. Most days I am sure there are interesting pages I can link to, but that has never been a primary focus of this blog. Beyond that, I've started to perceive some of the conscious or unconscious reasons that I started this blog no longer being fulfilled.First, I don't feel that I can do the ever-popular "bleeding-heart confessional" posts in this forum any longer. This is not because I have suddenly stopped feeling over-dramatic adolescent emotions, certainly, but because -- actually, I don't know why. I feel blocked, though. I start to write something with a little too much of myself behind it, and I delete it all.
Second, I don't want to talk at length about theology and philosophy in this format. I know that many people find blogging to be a breath of fresh air in this respect, but I've been doing it for a while, and I've had my breath. Now the shitty aspects stand out to me -- online discussion technologies combine the worst of both face-to-face encounters and the written word, encouraging one to dash off a quick response in order to keep up with a fast-paced conversation, then requiring one to stand by those words as if they were published in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal.
The lack of communication of tone, etc., but even more importantly, the lack of the intimidation that restrains one's behavior in face-to-face conversation, virtually guarantee that some people will come off as bigger assholes than they are actually trying to be and that some people will actually be far more vicious and personal in their attacks than they would dream of doing in real life. For instance, I think that in real-life conversation, I can be very diplomatic. I have been known to diffuse tense situations with a well-placed joke. In the online format, where elements of tone and timing are completely gone, that simply does not work. In fact, often the only way to avoid ever-greater escalation is to walk away.
I know that I have advantages in this respect that others don't have -- I'm involved in a PhD program, and I have class time and pub time when I can discuss these matters, with students and professors. And then there's also the creeping suspicion that in the time I spent yelling at Rich Puchalsky in some triple-digit comment thread at The Valve (for example), I could have already learned Italian, or written several pages of a publishable article, or made something for dinner other than macaroni and cheese. The Valve example isn't the only one or even the worst; I have had many, many deeply frustrating online conversations where I looked back and thought, "I not only wasted my time, but I allowed myself to be baited into acting like a total asshole." (I basically quit the CRI forum, in which I had participated for seven years, because of precisely that problem.)
And then, of course, I've seen many posts here that have been very serious and nuanced philosophical and theological arguments that were passed over in silence. The only discussion-generators, it would seem, are thinly-veiled personal attacks on a particular figure and all those who admire him or her -- or else some stupid thing about what color my phlegm was when I woke up with a bad cough this morning. Political analysis on blogs is almost always repetitious and tedious in that the same arguments get trotted out again and again, as unquestionable dogma -- "See, this is yet another example of how incompetent Bush is...," "Big-media reporters are spineless sycophants who like to feel like they're friends with powerful people...," etc. Because both liberal and conservative blogs are like this, blog-readers are obviously going to tend to read only their "side," since one is only ever going to encounter the same arguments repeated endlessly, which becomes tedious and even infuriating when one is reading about political stances to which one is opposed. The goal is not to "expand the conversation," but rather to strengthen the fortifications, to provide the already-initiated with the formulae necessary to succeed in today's ideological market.
I have not read anything new on a political blog since 2002, which was when I read all the stock arguments for the first time -- with the exception of Alphonse van Worden, who was probably the first genuinely new voice the blogosphere had received in a long time.
So I suppose that's why I don't do as much political blogging nowadays.
In any case, I'm stuck. I'm not sure what I'm getting out of this blog currently -- neither the previous therapeutic purpose, nor the sense of overcoming intellectual isolation, nor the (illusory) feeling of being a part of the political process is really operative right now. I'm not going to make a dramatic declaration about the future frequency of posts here, but I don't think I can any longer be relied upon for a post every single day, like I've been doing for the past year or so.
Tuesday Hatred and Friday Confessional will of course continue to be posted without fail, and perhaps some members of the Seething Throng of Silent Co-Bloggers will attempt to consolidate hegemony over the blog while I'm slacking off.
