Daily Archives: 26 Jan 08

Blogs

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Thanks to Walker for pointing me toward this essay by Sarah Boxer, which purports to explain blogs and blogging to New York Review of Books readers (as if most of them were unfamiliar with the medium, which I doubt). I don’t know who Boxer is, but her cred for this piece seems to be based on the fact that she was given a “dreadful idea for a book: create an anthology of blogs” two years ago. Could this have been her first serious acquaintanceship with the weblogging world? From this piece, it appears so. And a rather undiscriminating acquaintanceship it turns out to have become.

She agonizes over whether there is a distinctive blogging style of writing (duh); trumpets the assertion that the medium is different from journalism (a conceit the weblogging world got finished discussing several years ago); and seems to have a difficult time with the essential nature of hyperlinking and the fact that the experience of reading a weblog does not stay within the boundaries of the page as she claims is the case with other reading experiences. I don’t know about her, but my mind travels widely and freely, hyperlinks or not, when I read a book or a newspaper article as well. In fact, sometimes I have worried that the hyperlinking medium constrains and channels extensibility too much, rather than facilitating it.

She also makes much of the red herring (or is it straw man?) issue that many of the references she finds in weblog entries are elliptical. She complains that she feels left out because the weblog writers she’s been reading assume their readers are in the know, that you cannot read them successfully if you are not in the inner circle. With this concern she reveals her failure to grasp the central populist revolution of webcentric communication, the ability to remain viable even with incredibly balkanized audiences. (She also complains that bloggers seem to rely on the fact that their readers can get background on references with which they are unfamiliar by googling!) I have often concluded that the only people who read FmH when in profound disagreement with, or ignorance of, my values or premises are those who enjoy being contentious or compelled to demonstrate their ignorance. For better or worse, a thoughtful essay about the weblogging medium would continue to grapple with whether this balkanization and atomization is good for intellectual life at all. Although clearly new media have added potential to human communication, readers of FmH know that I have been troubled about the indubitable breakdown of discourse between people who disagree throughout our society. One needs to struggle with the ways in which this is being shaped by our changing media of communication, including but not restricted to weblogging and the net as a whole. But this is not where Boxer is going at all.Her concerns would make sense to me if she came right out and confirmed that she is discomforted by new media and yearns nostalgically to salve her anomie by returning to the days before the web added possibilities to written communication at all. But this woman was given a book contract to write about blogging!

One of Boxer’s core observation seems to be more insightful, although it is far from original to her:

“When the blog boom came, the tone of the blogosphere began to shift. A lot of the new blogs—though certainly not all of them—weren’t so much filters for the Web as vents for opinion and self-revelation. Instead of figuring out ways to serve up good fresh finds, many of the new bloggers were fixated on getting found. So the very significance of linking began to change. The links that had once mattered were the ones you offered on your blog, the so-called outbound links pointing to other sites. Now the links that mattered most—and still do—are those on other blogs pointing toward your blog, the so-called inbound links. Those are the ones that blog-trackers like Technorati count. They are the measure of fame.”

Because she is essentially unfamiliar with the weblogging world either longitudinally or in breadth, she takes every generalization for the rule. Of course, if she reads indiscriminately, she will come upon a preponderance of vapid bloggers concerned with getting noticed and little else. Most serious consumers of the medium (and I would hasten to include my FmH reades in that category) stick with the relatively smaller proportion of sites which say something to them. And that is really no different than any other medium of human interaction. Do we dismiss literature, film, journalism, music, the visual arts, or what have you because of the distasteful attention-seekers that occupy a proportion of their space? We either stay shallow and worship in the cult of celebrity, or get beyond it to find some more enduring value in the medium.

Because she takes the part for the whole, she can get away with assertions like this:

“Blogging at its freest is like going to a masked ball. You can say all the spiteful, infantile things you wouldn’t dream of saying if you were in print or face to face with another human being. You can flirt with anyone, or try to. You can tell the President exactly what you think of him. You can have political opinions your friends would despise you for. You can even libel people you don’t like and hide behind an alias.”

This ignores the webloggers of integrity who make it clear exactly who they are and express transparently the values they inhabit in their life. Writers or artists can hide behind a medium or express themselves through it, and, again, the audience of any particular weblog self-selects. By their choices, readers get the weblog content they deserve. Boxer’s conclusions from her reading choices suggest that, yes, she has gotten exactly what she deserves. She thinks she’s characterizing the weblogging world, but what she writes really has much more to say about herself. Consider:

“Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can’t fake that.”

A certain proportion of what I read in the NYRB impresses and inspires me. I have no patience for another proportion of its content, because of its tortured logic and the irrelevance of its erudition or pseudoprofundity. This is the rare NYRB piece utterly dismissible for its illogic, its lack of erudition and its failure to aspire to even the pseudo– level of profundity.