<< The prosody of Taking the Hobbits | Front Page | Poll: How to Write Literary Criticism >>
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Alan Jacobs on Blogging
Jacobs, a former prolific commenter here at the Valve, writes, “With few exceptions, posts at the ‘academic’ or ‘intellectual’ blogs I used to frequent have become the brief and cursory announcement of opinions, not the free explorations of new and dynamic thinking.“
What bullshit.
And what could be disturbingly perverse about Miéville? (Other than once referring to John Crowley’s work as “twee,” a word that should be retired from the language.)
Comments
I think Professor Jacobs is largely right. The architecture as he calls it of blogs does limit them. It also gives them advantages over other media. Blogs are not academic journals and one should not expect them to be. They do not even reach to the level of conference paper. They are instead a much rawer form of writing and idea development. In so far as they can serve an intellectual purpose it is at the level of putting out ideas fast for feedback. They are a very poor forum for engaging in long running debates over extensively researched and developed intellecutal positions.
For me blogs exist at the level between oral coversations on a topic and a conference paper. Hence they serve to get some feedback or at least put into writing ideas that are from reaching their final polished form. Below I have my own process of writing and the place my blog plays in it.
1. First I read both deeply and widely on the subject.
2. Then I start examining and comparing primary source material on the subject.
3. I bring up the subject with my uncle at the dinner table.
4. I compose a blog entry summarizing my basic ideas on the subject.
5. I expand the basic arguments into a conference paper complete with extensive footnotes.
6. I edit the conference paper and seek to make it both more concise and remove all inadvertant inaccuracies, blatant omissions and spelling and grammer errors. The edited paper is then submitted as a journal article.
7. The journal article is expanded and combined with other articles to form a more comprehensive book manuscript.
J. Otto Pohl, Ph.D.
He’s critical, yes, but it seems The Valve’s the exception:
One notable exception is the philosopher John Holbo, who edits and often writes for The Valve (http://www.thevalve.org), a website sponsored by the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics—and people often complain that his posts are too long.
At the very least, we’re praised-by-association.
I wonder if Jacobs is responding to the inevitable academic-blog malaise. One begins blogging with a weight on the heart, composing manifesto-like statements of purpose and large-scale criticisms of previous treatments of one’s issue. Then, after developing a little audience, you can test the waters with a few big essays on difficult subjects. Some readers stay while others depart. The core audience grows. More essays, perhaps shorter and less academically argued, appear. The comments section reaches its climax. Then some links from big-timers bring in a wave of new readers who cantankerously challenge assumptions, infuriate the current readership, and demand changes. The blog adjusts to fit, but outliers are ejected. Finally, the blog goes into its decadent phase, either purposefully outraging one’s core audience (who somehow aren’t the audience one used to know and love) or retreating into mundanities, shopping lists, provocative one-liners, and apologies.
Can a blog retrieve itself from the decadent phase? I quit my last one because I couldn’t rescue it. My new one’s still in the middle phase, and I hope to keep it there as long as possible, but it’s doomed like everything to die. I think we have to allow for our favorite blogs to burn out and start again.
I’d say you’re being too hard on Alan Jacobs, Jonathan (or is ‘bullshit’ a more manly-friendly term of vigorous engagement in the US than it is over here in the UK?) I wonder though why you call him a former commentator here at the Valve? Has he publicly withdrawn from us, or something?
I’d say the heart of his post is that nostalgic Lewisian quotation from the Oxford History of Literature volume about how the reformation, and its ensuing bloodshed, wouldn’t have happened if the theological issues had been debated only by sober-minded scholars in a closed room; but that printing was the devil that stirred millions to murderous rage. There’s something understandable in this I’d say, but also something elitist, something reactionary and something condescending to the mass of ordinary people (Lewis is thinking of himself as one of the people who’d still have access to these ‘dangerous’ ideas; it’s just the plebs who’d be denied it.
If Jacobs is asking for more courtesy in online discussions I’d agree with him. If he’s asking for more weighty intellectual content in blogposts, then I’d say he needs to shop around more: there are a billion blogs out there after all, and you’ll find something you like if you look long enough. But his Lewisian example is self-deconstructing, I’d say: militating for control over the blogosphere is just as self-defeatig, and wrongheaded, as militating for all printing to happen via a dozen printing presses all controlled by the Catholic Church. No in thunder to that idea.
Did you notice how the brief and cursory came after the brief and cursory?
I think there’s something to be said for the idea that Pullman’s too soft on Lewis, certainly.
I run a non-blog. Nothing is timely, and I don’t really have much interaction with readers (though ocasionally I get something going). I just write about what I’m interested in at whatever level depth and length I feel like. Intermittently and unpredictably one of my posts will start getting hits. A lot of my readers Google in—I’m probably writing a ton of college papers for people.
I think that keeping a line of steady chat going on a daily basis, and developing significant ideas, are at cross purposes. A light 200-word thingie appeals to many more readers than anything meatier.
One defect of the blog format is that posts get lost in the archive unless the blogmaster takes special steps.
"Did you notice how the brief and cursory came after the brief and cursory?”
I was about to write that Jonathan was just engaging in self-parody of his usual posting style, but he preemptively added a self-parody of his condescending crypticism as well. Now that’s efficiency.
Eh. Can’t get too worked up.
I’m most sympathatic to his complaint about pace & architecture. At even a moderately paced blog conversations can scroll off front page rather quickly, making them invisible to new visitors and less accessible to those already engaged. Still, it’s not at all unusual for The Valve to pick up comments on posts that are weeks or even months old, and my impression is that at least some of these comments are from people who weren’t in the original run of chatter. Either people go digging through the archives or they somehow get work of a specific conversation and look it up.
I can’t disagree with Jacobs about comments.
My blog started in the decadent phase, and I’m not sure where it is now. Traffic has been going down the last couple weeks, but I don’t take it personally—the weather’s been beautiful.
The Valve should think about getting a really doctrinaire Eastern Orthodox Christian with a deep love of Schmitt, Strauss, Voeglin, etc., to start posting here—it seems to have really livened up Long Sunday.
Maybe we can make a trade.
What bullshit.
Is not.
Interesting.
@A White Bear: You’re spot on w/r/t ‘decadence.’ So much for blog triumphalism. But I would say this contra Jacobs: if the only people who ever hear your scholarly ideas are fellow specialists responding to heavily-revised and -edited final drafts, of course you’ll grow accustomed to a certain level of discourse. But the breadth of responses to (for instance) a given Crooked Timber post is impressive. You have to filter out the dross, yes - but then you have to do the same thing in an academic setting, only part of disciplinary membership is the acquisition of a toolset for doing just that (e.g. don’t bother with this clown’s writing, look askance at contributions from the following school, etc.).
The lack of built-in orientation tools like institutional affiliation makes online discourse tiring for people not accustomed to that kind of Burly Brawling. But one thing that’s stayed true even past the Blog Triumphalist stage, which has indeed always been true: you get to know whom to trust, you learn how to filter good and bad, and you stay where the pickings are richest. I mean: duh. Jacobs’s point about academics as ‘bad journalists’ is well taken, but a certain realignment of expectations (i.e. not apparently waiting for a publishable article from each blogger every two weeks) would open up the old pleasures again.
He’s right about the Mieville seminar, though. Superb. Good comments too.
Alan, thank you for the kind words.
I’d say — contra Adam Roberts — that the “heart” of my article is my complaint about the unimaginative sameness of the technical architecture of blogs, which I think is productive if you want news and counter-productive if you want thoughts.
Good point about Lewis, though — while I’m not as sure as Adam is that Lewis would include himself among the decision-makers, there is certainly an anti-democratic impulse at the heart of his complaint. And maybe I’m participating in that more than I think.
And I would say, in response to Wax Banks, that I neither expect nor even want “publishable articles” or “heavily-revised and -edited final drafts”; after all, there are other places to get such things. What I want is more substantive discussion and argument than one can easily get in an environment in which posts disappear from the front page (and from most readers’ minds) in two days.
To Jonathan: surely Miéville would hear “disturbingly perverse” as a compliment.
And you’re welcome, John.
waxbanks says, “Jacobs’s point about academics as ‘bad journalists’ is well taken, but a certain realignment of expectations [...] would open up the old pleasures again.”
This reminds me of something smart Bitch, Ph.D. once said about how journalists think bloggers are just bad journalists, while bloggers think journalists are just bad critical thinkers.
(In a very small voice)
Granted, I’m not a regular Crooked Timberite, but I did contribute to the Mieville seminar, and I think I’m an English professor.
Although a lot of bloggers seem convinced that I’m a historian.
Sorry, Miriam!
Point taken, Alan. Contra Adam Roberts, eh? I like the sound of that.
There’s a strange economy involved in blogging, isn’t there, with the mechanism of exchange being ‘attention’ rather than money. What I mean is that there are so many hundreds of thousands of blogs, the shopper who logs on looking for something to read is so massively over-supplied, it can’t help but drive the price and quality down to Walmart levels.
In practical terms what this means, I think, is that in order to snare reader’s attention, and in particular to get get readers returning to your site, you need to offer: (a) something really funny ... which many sites do offer, but which, if it becomes the principle governing your writing, is bound to lead to a sort of flippancy incompatible with the moral seriousness for which Alan is asking; or (b) something really, in effect, loud, offensive, sexed-up, attention grabbing, which is obviously not conducive to serious and sober intellectual work. You also need to turn your copy around really quickly; new stuff every day is pretty much the baseline. No matter how much I like a blog, if I keep checking back in to find the content unchanged from week to week eventually I’m going to get bored, and instead go to—let’s say—blogs run by hilarious headless individuals whose insomnia means that there’s always juicy content there for me to read. But there are very few bloggers (headless examples excluded) who can string that bow of Odysseus: which is to say, who can provide high quality content all the time, day by day, week in week out. For most it leads to an inevitable dilution.
You also need to turn your copy around really quickly; new stuff every day is pretty much the baseline. No matter how much I like a blog, if I keep checking back in to find the content unchanged from week to week eventually I’m going to get bored, and instead go to—let’s say—blogs run by hilarious headless individuals whose insomnia means that there’s always juicy content there for me to read. But there are very few bloggers (headless examples excluded) who can string that bow of Odysseus: which is to say, who can provide high quality content all the time, day by day, week in week out.
I hope I’m not being presumptuous here, but I’m flattered...esp. since I’ve posted naught but crap for three weeks now. I mean, tonight I posted a video link dump. Granted, it’s the mother of all video link dumps, full of late ‘60s Leonard Cohen, mid ‘80s ‘Mats and a mini-career-retrospective of Tom Waits, but still, a link dump is a link dump is a link dump. The alternative, however, was far worse:
An extended retelling of the scene in Cocktail where the regulars at an exclusive Manhattan nightclub start chanting “We want a poet! We want a poet!” (One reason I didn’t do it was because I can’t remember if they wanted a poem or a poet. Damn this memory of mine!) Anyhow, here’s the original “poem”:
I am the last barman poet.
I see America drinking the fabulous cocktails I make,
Americans getting stinky on something I stir or shake.The sex on the beach,
The schnapps made from peach,
The velvet hammer,
The alabama slammer.I make things with juice and froth:
The pink squirrel,
The 3-toed sloth.I make drinks so sweat and snazzy:
The iced tea, the kamakazi,
The orgasm, the death spasm,
The Singapore sling, the dingaling.America you’ve just been devoted to every flavor I got,
But if you want to got loaded
Why don’t you just order a shot?
Obviously, that’d be too easy. What really interested me was the scene, the population of a posh Manhattan nightclub so desperate for poetry that after character-actor extraordinaire Kelly Connell delivers his, they chant for more. Mind-boggling, it is.
Of course, such “high"-concept hijinks aren’t what Alan has in mind when he talks about “quality” blogs. It’s more like low-minded noodling intended to preserve sanity; but still, I think there’s a place for it, both in academic blogging and academia at large. After all, if Kierkegaard could do it, why can’t we? Oh, that’s right, the over-weening professionalism of the current academy. I suppose that serves its purpose too…
*sigh*
Alan sez:
What I want is more substantive discussion and argument than one can easily get in an environment in which posts disappear from the front page (and from most readers’ minds) in two days.
That’s a convention and nothing more - you’re not talking about the architecture of blogs (as I’ve been suspecting), you’re talking about presentation and netiquette. A blog’s built-in associations between comments, trackbacks, posts, author pages, etc. - the ‘architecture’ at a slightly more fundamental level than you’re talking about, though abstracted somewhat from the database itself - certainly allow for the kind of sustained presentation of topics-of-interest that you’re talking about, or for highlighting serious responses.
The Valve for instance isn’t constructed that way. But it would be straightforward enough for someone proficient at such things to put together a plugin for Movable Type or WordPress that would create a ‘Get Yer Substance Here!’ sidebar and put a button next to every single post and comment in the Admins’ view, so that one click would drop items into a Pay Attention To This Stuff area for, say, a week or two. Indeed there are static elements to the front page of just about every blog; sufficiently motivated site admins can maintain such a sidebar without special tools. That’s a trivial example of a mechanism for ‘attention conservation.’
Other tools available: provide each post as a PDF for lovely-printed circulation a la the Mieville seminar; encourage academics to take part in the Carnivals that happen often in the blogosphere, which encourage slightly more focused discussion; look to the (to me mostly unreadable) Christian theological blogs, which do manage sustained discussion around persistent topics w/plenty of citations (you can guess the ration of MaMaLuJo-to-Chomsky citations easily enough); make members-only posts a la LiveJournal, inviting limited discussion, with a public comments area as well (this is a genuine architectural consideration), to keep comments more like a roundtable and less like a free-for-all; root for England in the World Cup (obviously); ruthlessly moderate comments to eliminate anyone who’s veering off-topic or -tone; etc. etc. etc.
I’m prone to making arguments about the in-built technical limitations of a given communications medium and its effect on the spectrum of possible messages communicated through it, but those are tiresome and repetitive arguments - and generally wrong, generally motivated by a personal relationship to the medium that’s necessarily limited. Fact is, a ‘blog’ is a set of conventions for authoring and presenting dynamic content, and thus far a robust and germinative one; the conventions can be mixed and matched easily enough, some abandoned, some radically altered, and if it’s serious discussion you’re looking for you should simply ignore the wider blog culture and consider the way that simple tools-related choices can constrain your own blog’s microculture. Things here at The Valve are quite good; Crooked Timber remains a shockingly high-level discussion; etc.
Last two suggestions: email helps tremendously. Outside the public-performance arena of blogging/commenting, email acts as a kind of release valve (Heh. Indeed!) and conspiratorial/coordination tool. An email list tied to a ring of blogs helps the proprietors stay focused - by, say, allowing you to notify the others when you’ve posted something in the group’s wheelhouse. Last suggestion: past some length n where n is less than 40 or so, flat Blogrolls become unwieldy and their utility decreases. OxBlog, otherwise unpleasant in any number of ways, features a compelling blogroll-organization model that I wish more bloggers would take the time to emulate. That allows readers to make the rounds within a given subject area more easily.
The work of establishing persistent communities of discussion is convention-engineering, not HTML-writing. Sorry this was longish and ranty.
If people abandoned the convention in which each new entry was date-stamped, and instead subject-classified each one so it would appear in archives under that subject, that would help.
They could still have the top page show the last week or month of additions. But when you go to a library, you generally don’t search for books by when they were added to the library.
Comment displays should not only show a list of the last 20 or so comments anywhere on the site, they should show a list of the major subject categories with total comments on each and how many were added within the last six months.
I should add before people feel like they should point this out that I realize that the Valve already has many of these features—the “Most recent comments” list, the search archives by category box—but they aren’t quite developed to the degree that might change the way that people use the site.
I don’t understand what Wax Banks means when he says that I’m “not talking about architecture”—software architecture has multiple levels, it’s not confined to the database. The post-plus-comments, newest-posts-at-top model is an architecture of presentation but an architecture nonetheless. (It’s all code.) But hey, call it what you will: the suggestions that Wax makes are what I had in mind when I wrote my article. I just want to lament the fact that hardly anybody deviates from the presentational norm, even though (as Wax says) it would not be especially technically difficult to do so.
Not to open a brand-new can of worms, but: there are blogospherical practices that need to be changed as well as architectures. For instance, way too many people have blogs of their own. This leads people to save the really important stuff for their own blogs and just make casual comments on other people’s blogs. If more people would put significant energy into their comments on others’ posts, this could significantly raise the level of comment conversations, and that in turn could lead bloggers to try to find modes of presentation that would highlight the best comments. Bloggers and commenters are getting better at not feeding the trolls, I think—witness the gradual starvation of the Troll of Sorrow—but are not doing such a good job at rewarding vitality and incisiveness among the commentariat.
As you say, Alan, it’s not just starving trolls that makes for a good comment field. It’s extremely important to keep community members you respect.
Some blogs are better than others at this. If a blog administrator has time to respond encouragingly to a new commenter who would make a good addition to the commenting family, that blog tends to get better, more incisive comments. And if other commenters are good at shepherding (asking follow-ups, responding courteously) you can make a nice little discussion out of it.
Also, administrators must be good at responding in an encouraging way to readers who respectfully disagree and prodding those who do agree to agree more complexly. Sycophants as well as trolls spoil the soup.
Thanks for the kind words about the seminars, but I am a little bemused at the claim that we’re devolving into bad journalists. I don’t think any of us would see ourselves as wanting to be journalists or anything like journalists - we don’t do the investigative reporting thing very well for one. We do have a fair amount of commentary on current events, but as we’re social scientists with an interest in politics, economics, sociological issues etc, it would be rather odd if we didn’t. And we’ve had this from the beginning; I don’t think that the mix has changed all that much over time, although there are seasonal variations as one or the other of us semi-disappears for a while to finish a book, raise infants or whatever. I don’t want to belabour this - if you don’t like what we’re doing these days, you don’t, and that’s perfectly fine of course - but I do think that the specific way you phrased your criticism wasn’t quite right (maybe you could expand??)
I would point out that the tendency of many bloggers, academic or otherwise (me included), to opine at great length about current events in an abstracted way, absent fine-grained facts that would be the most basic requirement of journalistic commentary, could be uncharitably and loosely called ‘bad journalism.’ Perhaps that’s what Alan means: politics wanking that’s half-baked punditry masquerading as ‘media criticism’?
/devil’s advocate
Sympathy for the devil, eh Wax? Yeah, that’s about right—though short & snarky annoys me more than rambly & angry, and I (of course) wouldn’t agree that I’m being uncharitable.
When I wrote that essay—about eight months ago, I think—it seemed that one post after another on CT was a brief sneer at the Bush administration, and the comments became virtually indistinguishable from those on Kos. I should probably, for Henry’s sake, go back and find the period and and posts, but I’m too lazy. I don’t hold any brief for the Bushies, but if I want that kind of thing Kos is always there, you know?
But I’ve noticed that lately the posts on CT have been consistently interesting, and the comments correspondingly better, so it’s back on my NetNewsWire. I guess I need a new thesis, huh?—some kind of Viconian theory of cyclical oscillations of energy in the blogosphere, maybe.
And if I had written that entry as a blog post—or even if I had a blog—I could more easily revisit the matter, couldn’t I? Tradeoffs everywhere. . . .
A big exactly to your last comment, A White Bear. I made a similar suggestion some time ago.
"No matter how much I like a blog, if I keep checking back in to find the content unchanged from week to week eventually I’m going to get bored...”
That’s why programmers like me do things like this, Adam. We’re not professional journalists when we self-publish, and there’s no reason why we should feel pressured to become professional journalists or produce bestsellers. That’s to escape prison and then install bars on one’s windows because they look bare.
To quote my own manifesto: “Erraticism equals discipline over the long haul.” My seventh anniversary of blogging is coming up, and I remain un-burnt-out partly because I allow myself a hiatus when I lack the impulse to write.