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Saturday, August 04, 2007
Sven Birkerts Contra Lit Blogging: Tumbling Dice
Here:
A GRADUALLY GRAYING book reviewer with several decades in the trenches, I’ve been nibbling at literary web sites and blogs for some time now—out of curiosity, to be sure, but also from a sense of vocational self-preservation. I’ve been trying to make my peace with the changes—and to decide once and for all if they represent an advance, a retreat, or simply the declaration of an emerging new order against which there is no point in kicking.
Article ToolsNew, yes, and yet still deeply intertwined with the old. So far it’s clear that the blogosphere is in vital ways still predatory on print, that the daisy-chain needs the pretext of some original daisy; its genius, its essence, is manifestly supplementary. This recognition gives some credence to the many who argue for coexistence, a meshing of print culture and digital, with the latter very much spawning from the former.
But I am also paranoid enough—or maybe forward-looking enough—to imagine the day when magazines and newspapers have begun to dwindle away and the world of text has shifted dominantly to screen. Indeed, I would say we are right now at what feels like a point of vital balance, and those of us involved with literary journalism and book-reviewing live with the sense of a balance teetering ...
I came to it via Clay Shirky, who describes this particular Gutenberg elegy as ‘almost indescribably self-involved’. I actually don’t think it’s that bad. What do you think? When he writes, “What we gain in independence and freshness we lose in authority and accountability,” I tend to think: no, the problem is really that you start to lose focus, and patience - in a couple senses of ‘patience’. Your mental life becomes a bit headlong and haphazard. Blogging gives you good habits, also bad. So it isn’t unreasonable to worry about what is lost. But I wouldn’t put ‘authority’ on the list of laments.
The Shirky piece is interesting in its own right. Is it wrong to put “Tumbling Dice” on your iPod, without listening to the whole of Exile? Shirky says: no. I tend to agree.
Comments
Key word: “authority”. E.G.. monopolies are being threatened. I am not a blog triumphalist at all, but almost everything print people write about blogs stinks of fear.
“Accountability”: with regard to news reporting, this is diametrically wrong. Without blogs the NYT and WaPo would have gotten away with it.
“Parasitical on print”: less and less true as time goes on. Talking Points Memo, Kos, and Firedoglake generate new content, and internet criticism of the broadcast media is similiar too, but better than, print criticism.
The only way to support the view that Exile is best listened to as an album, in other words, is to dismiss the actual preferences of most of the people who like the Rolling Stones.
This is true of most things. Pretty much by definition, the largest audience for anything includes a lot of people who don’t really know or care much about whatever it is. Attempts to broaden the TV audience for the Olympics totally ruined them for me.
I meant “i.e.”. and “similiar to”.
Blog comment editing is very unprofessional. Point taken.
John E., if you insert “the pretense of” after “we lose in,” the sentence makes a lot more sense. I suspect editorial interference from the Boston Globe editors.
Standard journalistic practice, but it’s all so terribly unfair. Oh, if there was only some way for the author to take control over—as well as accountability for—the words which appear under his byline! Some way… some way… some way....
I’ve been saying for quite awhile that the rewrite men and their bosses are the real villains in print journalism.
Along with the reporters who try to make the rewrite man’s job easier.
And also the ones who effortlessly give the rewrite man exactly what he wants.
I agree that authority as such isn’t what’s in danger here—obviously there is a hierarchy of bloggers (at least in politics), one which actually formed depressingly quickly. It’s similar to religious right people who talk about the decline in “moral values”—well, no, secular liberals have moral values, too, just different ones. Even if print somehow withers away, the websites of former print outlets will continue to have authority, and some new authorities (such as TPM) will arise alongside them. Cultural change happens.
Speaking of blogs, have they just decided to convert Crooked Timber into the new “John and Belle have a blog”?
It occurs to me that, whereas Birkerts worries about the culture losing focus, I only ever worry about myself. I think that is very sensible of me.
It was inevitable after J&BHAB turned into “Zoë has some crayons”.
One day I’ll post a worthwhile comment on this site, I swear.
Is it wrong to put “Tumbling Dice” on your iPod, without listening to the whole of Exile?
Insofar as this is a value judgment, yes.
These are very good points by Birkerts. But I don’t think we should complain about web logs. Given a future of a financial credit crunch, food, water, and petrol shortages, epidemics, overpopulation, increasing human migration, war and an arms buildup, and global warming, the resources needed for web logs, including expensive computers, electricity, etc., will decline in the near future.