Someone recently encouraged me to write more, because “words aren’t lifeblood. Words are cheap.” Words are certainly held cheap, and the blogosphere has drastically lowered the going rate.
This is a development entirely in conformity with the spirit of the age, which, as Wendell Berry observed, does not ask a man what he can do well but “what he can do fast and cheap.” Berry and I are not alone in thinking that this is a bad state of affairs. It’s no small problem that our society is trying to do very important business with increasingly debased currency. Which brings to mind Neil Postman.
Next year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Postman’s seminal Amusing Ourselves to Death. This crotchety but funny and incisive little book diagnosed American political discourse as frivolous two decades before George Weigel, writing in First Things’ pages, condemned vacuous narrative-driven politics.
But while Weigel blamed postmodern relativism, Postman argued that the cultural dominance of television, a medium designed to entertain and basically incapable of anything else, necessarily turned everything, including elections, into a form of entertainment.
Television presents the world as an easily comprehended spectacle marked by novelty and variety. If it is used to transmit serious ideas it will, at best, seriously distort them to make them more entertaining. “The medium,” he said, riffing on Marshall McLuhan “is the metaphor.” The ruling metaphor of a society determines how the world is chiefly understood and discussed.
Reading Postman for the first time last month gave me clearer language to explain my rage against the rise of blogging. For what he says about media can be said about literary forms—they are biased toward certain kinds of content. The blogpost is biased toward speed, brevity, and cleverness. It thus hands the public square over to bullies, sophists, and clowns.
Some of my very astute pro-blog friends have argued that, whatever their drawbacks, blogs create a democratic public space whose occupants are minimally beholden to state and corporate interests. For the discerning reader, entering the blogosphere is just like listening in on a fascinating conversation among free, brilliant interlocutors. The incompleteness, electicism, and so on are characteristic of good conversation.
There is of course some truth in that. There are proportionately few but absolutely many good blogs, and there’s nothing wrong with reading them. For all my young fogeyism I make a point of reading them myself.
But few of the good blogs my friends or I read are popular, and they are all constantly pushed towards superficiality by the ruling imperative of generating traffic.
Furthermore, even good blogging threatens to worsen our already bad relation with the written word. Several excellent bloggers have told me that they find it much harder than they once did either to follow sustained written arguments (especially when not tricked out with flashy rhetoric) or to make such arguments themselves; they have grown impatient with writing that does not meet bloggy criteria.
This is a disturbing development. As Postman argued, the written word remains the best tool of serious public discussion, whether political, religious, philosophical, or scholarly. The written word freezes thought, making it the ideal medium for precise, complete, carefully ordered, rational arguments, which may then be inspected and discussed at length.
Writers who expect sustained public inspection tend to think long and hard before publishing. Readers who assume writers have thought long and hard tend to read with intense attention. This leads, in general, to good writing, good reading, and good thinking. Such an environment is a precondition for vigilant citizenship and a civil society vibrant with critical intelligence. What is more, this environment disciplines speedy, prolific, lively writers, ultimately to their own advantage.
Of course I have no idea what policies, programs, or movements could plausibly revive what Postman calls the Typographic Mind. The only solution I know is a slow, personal one: It is the painful discipline of changing my own detestable habits of inattention, sloppiness, and waggish opportunism in daily conversation, whether written or oral, and of writing with the assumption that my reader's attention is generous and his time valuable.
But most of all I try to limit my time among the tireless chatterers of the blogosphere. This alone can preserve some sense of the reverence for words I would like to retain, however much and however fast I write.
Certainly, indolence, cowardice, or vanity can hide behind pretended reverence for words, but irreverence seems quite obviously the more pressing danger. A little care and humility is in order, for words are the main vehicle of culture and science, and the vital medium of a free republic. They bind the living and the dead, God and man into a communion of love and knowledge. Words are not lifeblood, except in the sense that they are.
Stefan McDaniel writes from New York.
Comments:
I've been blogging for over ten years, in various capacities, in various places, and I've learned that the best way to ruin an otherwise good blog site is by trying to "play" to some readership or purpose beyond which you really are passionate about.
The most interesting blogs I read are those that know their niche and stick with it.
I'm sure that back when the "blogging" of the day took the form of gossip at the community well, there was concern expressed by somebody about the "chattering classes" ... but there was One who saw the opportunity at a well to talk about the Water of Life.
Perhaps we have the same opportunity in the blogosphere.
"Several excellent bloggers have told me that they find it much harder than they once did either to follow sustained written arguments (especially when not tricked out with flashy rhetoric) or to make such arguments themselves; they have grown impatient with writing that does not meet bloggy criteria."
It has caused me to fear that Alzheimer's or some kind of dementia is robbing my brain of it capacities, far too soon. But maybe it is just blogging - but what if blogging drives the brain to Alzheimer's or dementia?
Someone should do a study - and blog about it.
http://wasillaalaskaby300.squarespace.com
This really seems like the blogs you are reading are more interested in popularity or in making money than in good discussion.
I agree with Rev. McCain, "The most interesting blogs I read are those that know their niche and stick with it." To which I would add "instead of looking for popularity or money."
Having made the above observations, I can't help but wonder what exactly you hope to accomplish by decrying the development of blogs? Do you want legislation to eliminate blogs? Or perhaps some organization promoting "good blogging standards?"
Your argument strikes me as simply a new entry in the "this change is bad, the world was a better place before" genre of essays. Yes, the automobile is bad because you can't give it its head and have it take you home, like you can sometimes do with a horse. Yes, the typewriter is bad, because now few people have decent handwriting. Yes, having multiple fonts on the computer is bad because most people don't choose well when they select fonts, and the documents end up distasteful or distracting.
You seem to reach this view by making some assumptions that may not be justified. If blogging really "threatens to worsen our already bad relation with the written word" why would we assume that this will be permanent or that it wouldn't happen anyway, or that our society won't develop some counteracting element that will bring the relationship back? And why would we assume that the quality won't come back after our society has explored enough what can be done with this new form?
In my view, the only reason to assume that the bad relation would be permanent is if there is no obvious value to the well-written word. If good writing has value, in an open society it will find a way to come out, and society, or some portion thereof, will value media that use it.
Given this, why should it matter if the relation with the written word is worse on blogs than elsewhere? I agree that the vast majority of blog posts (including many of my own authorship, I admit, and probably this comment itself), could have used a lot more thought and work. But that fact is only relevant if you assume that blogs have the same relationship with readers that previous forms did, or that blogs will eventually replace those other forms. I don't think either of these is likely.
You give television as an example of how the written word can suffer. Yes, television is full of distorted entertainment and relatively little well-expressed, well-thought material. So what? Has the best writing somehow found it more difficult to be published? Did television really kill-off any sources of good writing? Or did it mainly attract people who didn't read and perhaps give them some exposure to other ways of thinking and occasionally good writing in a different, previously unavailable form? Did television make it more difficult for writers to get published? Or were there simply more writers, perhaps even attracted by publishing, looking to be published, increasing the competiton to get published.
Just as television hasn't really killed off writing, I don't think that blogs have yet killed off any good writing either. Last I checked, in general, any media that had an editor or other gatekeeper to ensure quality still had a better reputation than media that do not. In general blogs don't have editors, so they don't have the same level of quality. And those that do have editors, generally have better-written material--material that sometimes has been worked on more, at least when the editor makes suggestions and the author revises based on those suggestions and his own thoughts.
It is probably early in the development of blogs to say exactly what they are, or how they relate to their readers or to previous forms. I like to think of blogs as more of a public "first draft"--initial thoughts that will be revised later, often using the reactions that come from comments. The same kind of thing an academic sometimes gets from colleagues, or that writers get from editors or students get from their major professors. If this is a valid way of seeing blogs, then the ideas in blog posts will eventually re-appear in a well-written and well-explored manner in other forms.
I'm sure that many other views of what blogs are have been made, and many may be much more valid than mine. But I believe most recognize that blogs are not like previous forms, nor are they meant to replace them.
Get it out of your head that blogs are like other media, and I think that your concerns will go away.
I'll close by saying that "The Word was made Flesh"
Peace
While it is certainly true that the current culture has seen a drastic decline in reverence for words and a continuing blindness to the importance of the definitions of words, I would not agree that blogging contributes to this decline any more than sloppy writing contributes to the decline of good literature. Yet, even in the midst of stacks of trashy romance novels, poorly-written sensationalist "literature" and memoirs that are merely vehicles for political gain, the human race has still managed to produce a Jane Austen, a Shakespeare, a T.S. Eliot, a J.R.R. Tolkein, and many others. Each of these were not the only writers of their time churning out books. Good writing will always survive - even if it is not appreciated in its own time.
In defense of those blog authors [including myself] who do take time to draft and revise before publishing a post, I think that to attack the medium misses the point. While it may be true that blogs provide many bad writers a chance to inflict the reading public, it also provides a chance for good writers to reach an audience, however small, that would have remained unreachable. And in all honesty, many publishing houses care only about publishing popular drivel. Not every book that makes the NY Times Bestseller List is good and lasting literature.
As T.S. Eliot once said: "Most editors are failed writers. But so are most writers."
Peace and keep writing!
First, though, I share some of the sentiments- I browse different political blogs, and sometimes despair over the witless screeching stridency, the lack of serious thought, and allthe horrors that others hve commented on.
However, I don't really think this is new. Throughout American history, politics WAS a form of entertainment- the Lincoln-Douglas debates were not polite frock coat versions of Firing Line, but rather raucous live action versions of Crossfire.
When you read about elections in the 1800's what comes across is the sense of rowdiness, vulgarity and coarseness, (for example, opponents of Grover Cleveland howling "Ma Ma, where's my pa?" a dig at his siring a child out of wedlock- would that be out of place at a John Edwards rally today?)
And yet democracy and serious intellectual inquiry survived and prospered.
First, Mr. McDaniel seems to assume that the blogosphere region of the public square dominates all other regions. Nonsense. Network and cable TV, talk radio and print media stubbornly hold territory in the public square.
Second is the assumption that what is published in the blogosphere influences the public at large. I'd bet a dime to a dollar that 99.9% of it does not.
Third, the public square was once dominated by bullies, coastal snobs and dismissive elites whose opinions uniformly converged on a singular idiotic narrative of everything, that is to say, a liberal world view. This is no longer the case thanks to cable TV, the blogosphere, talk radio and print media such as the Wall Street Journal and the National Review.
In sum, the public square has never been more cacophonous or vibrant, and caveat emptor is the pathetic refrain of the dull wits who lost their monopoly because their tedious unison created demand for new voices.
On the idea that "the medium is the metaphor," I tend to see a straight line from television to talk radio to the Internet, with each succeeding development picking up the worst features of its predecessors. TV encourages emotion rather than intellect. Talk radio encourages people to scream at each other. No surprise then that much Internet communication has the characteristic of people lobbing Molotov cocktails from behind barricades. So where is the meeting of the minds?
These media give us perhaps an undeserved sense of certainty about the topics they cover. Before we're tempted to vent on the outrage of the day, maybe we need to stop and think -- how much do I really know about the subject at hand? Media reports are usually limited in scope. When I was in J-school, we knew that we were serving an important but limited purpose; those perceived limits have been chucked overboard with everyone scrambling to get the last word.
I left the newspaper business when a new company bought my paper, and the new management wanted reporters to spend less time researching and writing and more time shooting video for the paper's website. Alas, it was too much for this Postman disciple to handle.
"The reverence for words..." Chase the winds whilst you blow them my friends.
Lavaux: Yeah, I knew it was bad as soon as I found out it was a screed and not just an essay.
William: What you're looking for is right below the Tab key on the far left.
Care to respond to my arguments rather than dismissing them on the basis of the word "screed"? By the way, the word "screed" precisely describes Mr. McDaniel's long, monotonous piece of writing.
For example, on Jason Goroncy's substantial site (http://cruciality.wordpress.com/) he has posted the corpus of the seminal British theologian P.T. Forsyth. Twenty years ago I had to travel to Oxford to find some of the more obscure writings of this important figure. Now I can read him in my pajamas, and converse with clever, knowledgeable people around the world about him.
I have read and appreciated Postman's thesis, but he was talking primarily about TV, which is a much more passive medium than the blogosphere. And in a strange way, blogging makes people focus more on words. It is a literary medium.
So, I think it is hasty to condemn a new communication technology. Gutenberg was so condemned. The wheat and the tares grow together and on the Day they will be sorted out.