Saturday, April 15, 2006
(12:40 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
On Taking Blogs Seriously
Blog traffic is important, because one wants to have a guaranteed audience for one's thoughts.Therefore, one must post every day, so that people do not lose interest. But then one ends up writing a lot that is not worth reading.
And also, one must make friends with other bloggers, who can help generate traffic. But then one is tempted to be overly cautious in what one is saying, and can in fact get caught in the middle of wars between two friends or "allies." And so one ends up reading and writing a lot that is not worth any amount of time or attention.
If one wants a large audience while simultaneously being a "public intellectual" of some kind, one must try to be a political blog, because our intellectual culture is entirely dominated by politics (in the most reductive sense of the word) and everything must have a political pay-off. But then one ends up pandering to an impatient audience that already knows what it thinks and will complain if you write what you actually want to write -- unless one sincerely wants to write, say, hackwork propaganda for the Democratic party. (Some people really do want to do that -- and in general, they do a fine job of it. I couldn't do better, and I wouldn't propose myself as their replacement, no matter how much traffic I could generate thereby.)
We live in serious times, so serious blogs must address serious topics in order to be taken seriously. Blogs are reshaping our political culture in an unprecedented way -- into a flurry of clipping and commenting and posturing and "snark," crowding out all hope for genuine reflection.
Or is that just the same thing? I don't know anymore -- I can't remember anything, don't want to remember anything, that happened more than a week ago.
