what blogs can and can't do
I’ve had a few things to say over the years on the topic of what blogs don’t do well. Let me return once more to that delightful theme.
In our recent debates about religion — prompted by Jerry Coyne’s review-essay in The New Republic on science and faith — an interesting issue has come up. On one thread, Johnny Sagan protests “the Tendentiousness and Obstreperousness of conservative cultural critics trying to eviscerate an article like Coyne’s on these kinds of academic-philosophical lines. Better to stand up for the details of what YOU believe in about the matters in question.” And on the other, Chet the Impaler, in an uncharacteristic flash of insightfulness, says to me, “you’ve been pretty careful not to take a religious position, here.”
Chet is right; and I’m not going to do what Johnny suggests. A blog-with-comments is a piss-poor place to debate matters like the existence of God. It’s not even a good place to debate whether Obama’s stimulus bill is likely to be successful. Blogs just don't do complexity and nuance — which, I think, is why they’re so popular. As everyone knows, the less complex and nuanced the positions on a blog are, the more comments it gets. This is an Iron-Clad Law of the Internet. Blog posts are just too short to deal with the Big Issues, and too likely to be fired off in short order, with minimal reflection and no pre-post feedback from wiser and cooler heads. Andrew Sullivan may think this is a good thing, but I’m not inclined to agree. And of course comments are usually even worse than posts in these respects. Some wonderful conversations happen in blog comment threads, but they happen in spite of the architecture, not because of it. The architecture is fighting thoughtfulness with all its might.
So when the Big Issues come up here on the Scene, when I pitch in what I try to do (inconsistently, I know) is to clarify terms, to achieve a better sense of what issues are actually at stake. Back in the fall this meant not defending or attacking Sarah Palin, but trying to explain why even people who didn't agree with her policies might feel sympathy for her. Now, in response to Jerry Coyne — whose TNR piece, by the way, was not a blog post but a several-thousand-word essay — the last thing in the world I would try to do is defend Christianity or theism, even though most of the people reading these words know that I’m a Christian. (I've published seven books and a couple of hundred articles, so my thoughts on way too many topics are out there for public scrutiny.) As the E-Trade baby says in a recent ad, this is not the venue. What I think I might be able to do, though, is show where I think Coyne has created some straw men and false dichotomies — not in order to defend theism, but in order to clarify what I think the real arguments are. I do this because I often think that people are at each other’s throats unnecessarily, and that the differences that separate, say, theists from atheists — while real and substantive and incapable of being erased — are not quite as great as often assumed, and do not require the vitriol that we commonly see from both sides.
The hope is to improve the discourse, not to settle age-old arguments in five hundred words or less. Before you plow and sow you have to clear the ground. Of course, I may do this very badly. But clearing the ground is what I’m after. I think that’s often the best the highly flawed technology of blogging can do.
There’s a (very un-pc) saying: Arguing on the internet is like running in the special olympics: even if you win, you’re still retarded.
It’s a crass way of putting it, but I certainly think it conveys what you’ve written. Blogs just aren’t usually the time or place to discuss The Big Issues.
— Jay · Feb 9, 03:08 AM · #
I’ve been keeping a blog as an online artist’s journal for just over four years now. Part of it’s purpose is promotional; after all, business is business. But it’s also been a good place to hash out ideas, to distill and clarify, without the expense of actually shooting film stock, and without the long feedback loop that is part and parcel of working in film.
One unexpected thing I have noticed. Not surprising, over the years my readership has grown; to the point that my main blog page is the most visited page on the website and then there’s the RSS feed on top of that. Despite this, commenting on my blog has dwindled to almost nothing. People read, but mostly they have nothing to say in response, or at least nothing they want to put in the comments.
I don’t know what, if any, inferences can be drawn from that.
I do enjoy commenting on other people’s blogs, for various reasons. Some blogs are like a neighborhood bar I fancy I’d like to hang out in. Some are like fight club. I enjoy both.
— Tony Comstock · Feb 9, 03:29 AM · #
What if your blog is thousand-word essays?
— Freddie · Feb 9, 03:49 AM · #
Alan, sounds to me like what you’re looking for is the blog equivalent of the Slow Food movement. Slow Blogging? Is that a contradiction in terms? Or is it just another way of saying “I write for journals nobody reads”?
— Peter Suderman · Feb 9, 06:28 AM · #
On this point, I completely agree. But if you say that on a blog, inevitably the debate will emerge. Essentially, if you ever say “This is not a good forum to debate the existence of God” it will immediately erupt into that very debate.
However…
Not all blogs do, sure, but I think this sort of undermines a lot of great blogs, that really do actually get into some pretty complex, interesting debates. It may happen over the course of several posts, but you get nuance, you get complexity. Then again, you are indeed right to suggest the least-nuanced, most hard-lined blogs do seem to gather the largest crowds. The loudest crowds, too, but not really crowds worth gathering….
— E.D. Kain · Feb 9, 07:15 AM · #
Following on Freddie and Peter’s comments. Given it seems like much of our discourse seems to be increasingly headed to the Internet/blogosphere, might we not attempt to alter the architecture and approach to better house discussions on important and substantive topics. Granted, doing so might sacrifice popularity in the short to medium term, but that seems like a small price to pay if such a transformation were to ultimately prove successful.
— Scott H Payne · Feb 9, 07:20 AM · #
Heh. Invasion of the Ordinary Gentlemen. It’s a topic near and dear to our hearts.
— Scott H Payne · Feb 9, 07:25 AM · #
E. D., I didn’t express myself clearly — there certainly are individual blogs that do complexity and nuance, but the general architecture of blogs militates against that. The Ordinary Gentlemen-style thousand-word posts are obviously far better than the fired-off bloviations that dominate the blogosphere, but let’s reflect that that essay by Jerry Coyne on science and religion is about seven thousand words, I think, and still is forced to oversimplify the issues pretty dramatically.
There are ways to swim upstream against blog architecture, but as Peter suggests, many of them will cost you readers. I do have some other ideas which I will mention later, either here or in the soon-to-be-revived Text Patterns.
— Alan Jacobs · Feb 9, 02:36 PM · #
<em>“Alan, sounds to me like what you’re looking for is the blog equivalent of the Slow Food movement. Slow Blogging? Is that a contradiction in terms? Or is it just another way of saying “I write for journals nobody reads”?”</em>
and
<em>“There are ways to swim upstream against blog architecture, but as Peter suggests, many of them will cost you readers.”</em>
This seems a rather narrow construct for defining both a blog’s purpose and measuring a blog’s success. Almost anyone smart enough to make a living writing can probably make a more lucrative living more easily pursuing some other vocation. Reading TNC’s blog today one can rather easily infer that he’d make more money as a school teacher in Nassau Country than he does as a blogger at the Atlantic. There are similar bread crumbs in Andie’s blog. Given his position, AJ annual salary can be guessed at with reasonable accuracy too. We’d all have been better off going into dentistry.
What do blog do? What do you want your blog to do? Readers? A Claque of sycophants? Dissent? Money? A blog can give you all these things, and other things as well.
— Tony Comstock · Feb 9, 05:33 PM · #
Soon to be revived Text Patterns? Hey, that’s good news! Have I missed something in the blog-news-universe….?
— E.D.Kain · Feb 9, 06:17 PM · #
Chet the Impaler! I love it. (Not because I know anything about Chet—I just like the term.) I usually just say whatever goofy thing comes to mind on a blog since my thought processes about the deep issues of life are like stew in a crockpot set on SLOW COOK—and it’s only 11:00 a.m. The main reason (I think) blogs are unsatisfying is that they lack the sensory, spiritual and intellectual experiences we have when we talk with people in the same room. This conversation around a table in a pub or an old French restaurant would be terrific.
— Joules · Feb 9, 11:34 PM · #
To Jay—
If a person runs and wins in the Special Olympics, those cheering him on are not likely to think of him as retarded.
If they hear you using the word “retarded,” they’re likely to think of you as being uninformed and, perhaps, not large-minded.
— Julana · Feb 10, 01:16 AM · #
No nuance in that comment. . . .
Most people with cognitive impairments, their friends, and family members are offended by the use of the word “retarded.” I have read frequent discussions of it on lists and groups over the years. It’s amazing how oblivious (or uncaring) much of the “parallel” world is to their (our) feelings—e.g., Tropic Thunder.
— Julana · Feb 10, 01:31 AM · #
What you say is true, Alan, but (a) blogs are (often) still a step up from television “news” programs and (b) might it be the case that the “blog architecture” (is there such a thing as a blog architecture?) actually helps focus writing, making people more concise and less verbose? After all, nuance and complexity are just sometimes interminable bloviations. (Not at TAS, of course…)
— Bryan · Feb 10, 04:49 AM · #
The prevailing spirit of the blogosphere:
Do you know what the Devil looks like? The Devil looks like you.
The all-too-rare alternative:
Do you know what the Devil looks like? The Devil looks like me.
— Tickletext · Feb 10, 05:38 AM · #
Bryan:
on blog architecture, while there is certainly a broad variety in the specific mechanisms of blogging and comment threads, there are certain elements that are common to all blogs. Off the top of my head:
1. Posts arranged in chronological order, newest at the top and older ones further down the page. The assumption is that content will be added to the page in discreet “chunks”, which will displace rather than replace previous content.
2. Usually a multi-column page format, with a Title head at the top, general information and links on the side, and the main content in the middle. This forms a very simple and easily comprehensible hierarchy of information on the page. It also emulates, to a certain extent, the design of a newspaper page.
3. Almost always an author tag line on each post, indicating who posted it to the blog. This maintains the awareness that each post is (a) personally authored and (b) distinct from each other post.
4. Very often, a link to a comments thread related to each post, almost always appearing at the bottom of the post, linking to a separate page/window for reader comments. Again, this forms a hierarchy of information, and also segregates reader-generated content from author-generated content. This is one of the main things that makes blogs different from bulletin boards.
6. Easy and pervasive use of hypertext links, both to other prts of the blog and to other pages. It’s easy to take this for granted, but that’s just because it’s so central to the structure of blogs.
5. While a broad category, I would also add that all the restrictions of HTML formatting apply also, as well as the requirements (color scheme, type size, column with, etc.) for effective display on a standard computer monitor.
Those are what I would call the common architecture of blogs; at least that’s what I can think of off the top of my head. For yourself, you could try thinking about what makes you realize you’re reading a “blog” rather than some other kind of website.
There are definitely conventions to the style of log writing, some influenced by the architecture more than others. I agree with Alan that it’s quite important to recognize the strengths and weaknesses inherent to the blog design concept, ifwe’re going to try to figure out how to use them effectively.
(Is that 1,000 words? :))
— Ethan C. · Feb 10, 05:53 AM · #
Dude, a matchbox is sufficient space to debate the existence of God. This is the 21st century, you know.
— William · Feb 10, 07:16 AM · #
William: Interesting comment. Not too long ago, we were debating about the number of angels that could stand on a pin.
And I certainly agree with your premise – the existence of God is so staggeringly obvious that you might as well debate the existence of air.
— ZZMike · Feb 10, 07:27 PM · #
Just yesterday I was explaining to my nine year old daughter that there are people who like to argue, and that among these sorts of people there exists a subset of people who especially like to argue about questions to which the answer can never be known.
Upon receiving this bit of fatherly wisdom, my daughter offered nothing but silence in response. I will hold a snap-shot of her expression in my mind’s eye for ever.
Children are a gift.
— Tony Comstock · Feb 10, 07:41 PM · #
“And I certainly agree with your premise – the existence of God is so staggeringly obvious that you might as well debate the existence of air.”
Funny, that’s what they used to say about the four humors and the solar system revolving around the unmoving earth.
— Bad · Feb 12, 07:08 PM · #
I wonder if you might spare a few words on how, in your view, name-calling and evasiveness “improve the discourse.”
Or is that something that blogs can’t do as well?
— Chet · Feb 17, 06:56 AM · #