I was really looking forward to Andrew Sullivan's Atlantic Monthly article on Why I Blog. I read it as it I was eating a piece of chocolate thinking here was someone who could articulate all my inner feelings toward blogging in one cogent article. The man has been blogging since 2000 and has an enormous audience, so I was thinking surely this is the guy to sum it all up for us. (And, I was sort of wanting something to talk about at UCEA in a couple weeks when I have a session on why blogging is relevant to school leadership programs - btw, Jon Becker is working hard to UStream that session - fingers crossed). Well, on the article, ... it was a nice read, but I got a few problems with it.
1. Sullivan clearly views blogging as a offshoot of journalism. I don't. Yes there is a segment of blogging that stems from newspapers and other mainstream media sources, but the vast majority do not. I have a professional blog that is an offshoot more of my research and teaching. Others have personal blogs. Or purely instructional blogs. Do we need to start making real distinctions between different forms of blogs? It wouldn't be such a bad idea because I am not a real big fan of being lumped into the same category as nonsense like this.
2. Most bloggers don't start with a ready made audience. Sure, some of us get lucky enough to blog for CASTLE, but my three years toiling away without the Dr. in front of my name gave me that opportunity. Very few bloggers get "Within minutes of my posting something, even in the earliest days, readers responded. E-mail seemed to unleash their inner beast." That happen for anyone else? Charlie Russo didn't e-mail me the day I started blogging and question my take on religious issues. Nor did I expect him to. Nowadays I get a good number of folks e-mailing me, but again, this is year 4. I hope people don't get false hopes of some ready made audience from Sullivan's post because ... it ain't happening.
3. Relatedly, Sullivan thinks blogs are highly regulated by readers. "To the charges of inaccuracy and unprofessionalism, bloggers could point to the fierce, immediate scrutiny of their readers." Again, this is probably true if you have over 700,000 hits per day. Not so much true if you only have 100. Frankly, I can say dumb things on here and get away with it, as can a whole lot of other people. If someone doesn't comment on a post within the first few days, it is lost to the Google archive.
4. "blogging rewards brevity and immediacy" - Yes and no. Here is a really brief, immediate site in the education world (I refuse to use its name). Yet, this site is pretty universally disrespected in the education blogosphere. I do think lots of teachers read it, but there is a difference between getting the lowest common denominator readers and respect in the blogging community. Since most of us are not doing this to generate $$$, respect is as important as hits. Personally, I think Sullivan's blog itself is too brief and shallow on many issues. There is almost no analysis. If I wanted news, I would read MSNBC. News blogs come and go because always posting fresh content is tough because it is not personal. Analysis blogs stay around a long time because the personal analysis IS the content that people are willing to come back for.
Anyway, there are tons of points in the article that I agree wholeheartedly with. Such as:
1. "A blog, therefore, bobs on the surface of the ocean but has its anchorage in waters deeper than those print media is technologically able to exploit."
2. "That [blogging] atmosphere will inevitably be formed by the blogger’s personality."
3. "Not all of it is mere information. Much of it is also opinion and scholarship, a knowledge base that exceeds the research department of any newspaper. A good blog is your own private Wikipedia. Indeed, the most pleasant surprise of blogging has been the number of people working in law or government or academia or rearing kids at home who have real literary talent and real knowledge, and who had no outlet—until now."
4. "But writing in this new form is a collective enterprise as much as it is an individual one—and the connections between bloggers are as important as the content on the blogs."
5. "blogging suffers from the same flaws as postmodernism: a failure to provide stable truth or a permanent perspective."
And more.
But, I was highly disappointed. This was not the blogging chocolate I was craving. I don't think Andrew and I are on the same page when it comes to this blogging thing (of course, it doesn't help when he cites "the brilliant polemics of Karl Kraus" - ?). Blogging remains for me something too personal for someone else to articulate.
Update: Here is Ambinder interviewing Sullivan on Blogging.
Update 2: Not that we need any more evidence that blogging is mainstream, but George Stephanopoulos is now blogging.