Blogging Part II
I came across an exchange on Slate between journalist Andrew Sullivan and novelist Kurt Andersen, in which the two writers exchanged observations about the cultural significance of the phenomenon of blogging. Both agree that it represents a positive trend in the sense that it democratizes news analysis and challenges the hegemony of the mass media. Andersen, however, seemed considerably less effusive in his praise, perhaps because he himself feels less capable than Sullivan of taking full advantage of the blogging form:
I’ve always thought that particular writers (and editors) are temperamentally and intellectually suited to particular frequencies: there are daily writers, weekly writers, monthly writers, book writers. Some people can successfully and happily straddle a couple of categories, occasionally three. The blog, obviously, extends this frequency spectrum to the hourly and beyond. In other words, there is a peculiar rat-a-tat-tat blogging temperament, a sensibility that craves and thrives in the perpetual fray. Everyone doesn’t have it. For instance, I really do not.
I was reminded of an observation made by Don Knuth, a major free software figure who gave up using email long before Netscape introduced its Web browser to the public and ushered in the Internet revolution:
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.
Some writers can churn out semi-hourly observations about important current events and imbue their posts with the illusion of depth simply by the sheer luminosity of their prose. While challenging the hegemony of the mass media strikes me as a worthy project, I think it would be a mistake to confuse the musings of the most respected bloggers–however eloquent–with the analysis of legitimate news publications that bring considerable research resources to bear on their offerings and that pay writers to spend time on a particular subject.
The most interesting part about the exchange, however, was Sullivan’s implication that the Internet appears to have rescued the written word from decline. Apocalyptic predictions of a “post-literate” civilization attended the advent of the Internet in the form of books like Sven Birkerts’ The Gutenberg Elegies and a the resurgence of the popularity of Marshall McLuhan. The assumption was that the Internet would accerlerate the trend–ushered in by the invention of television–toward a hypervisual culture which would supplant the written word with an obsession with images. Both the well-established practice of email, and now the less well-established phenomenon of blogging challenge this prediction. Sullivan observes:
As modern as they are in their instantaneity, blogs, like e-mail, seem winningly old-fashioned to me. E-mail enabled the revival of an essentially dead epistolary tradition. And blogs remind me of nothing so much as the published diaries of the 19th-century New York patricians Philip Hone and George Templeton Strong, whose daily diary entries consisted of frank, pithy commentary on trends and important news interwoven with vivid personal glimpses of metropolitan life.
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I like your idea of just getting some cash and paying, say, five good bloggers to write for a single online mag. In some ways, that’s how reviews and magazines started out decades and centuries ago: a few like-minded souls collaborating on a literary-political project. Perhaps blogs–and the technology that enables them–will take us back to the 18th century. I sure hope so. Take a wonderful little blog, OxBlog. It’s a small bunch of ex-pat grad students at Oxford who have essentially started their own magazine.
Still, referring back to my comments about Anderson and Knuth, I find myself unable to share Sullivan’s excitement. The immediacy of the Internet as a medium–and especially its tendency to send users off hyperlinking to nearly limitless amounts of data about whatever subject–seems to undermine the possibility of addressing any given subject with sufficient depth. Like Knuth, anyone who wishes to tackle a subject in its totality probably would have to forswear both email and especially “blogging” to do so properly.