Tuesday, May 11, 2004
On blogging
I started this weblog a few months ago, intending to post infrequently---perhaps ever few weeks---humorous pieces on "mad social science". Although I'm a pretty ordinary (and sane!) social scientist myself, this was to be just a place to put interesting but weird ideas glimpsed on the internet or devised from my own daydreams. I thought I would also pass along the occasional interesting political or economic new story or working paper.
Instead, most of my time posting has been taken up with the insanity that is the Bush administration. Every week, I think I've seen it all, but there is always a new level of stupidity, greed, incompetence or depravity to reveal. If this were well understood and well covered by the mainstream media outlets, I'd leave them to it. But it seems that under Bush, it takes the effort of thousands of bloggers, pushing stories that otherwise might not make more than one news cycle, or get out of the wire round-up, into the public consciousness. Trent Lott's embrace of segregation is just the best example.
So I feel obliged to do my part, but only because the outrage is so palpable. Yet it irks me that so much of what needs to be told right now is black-and-white. It would be more fun to write of complex public issues, where I could get some serious value added out of my social science training. Instead, we've got burning "questions" like "torture, right or wrong?" or "ignoring al-Qaeda pre 9-11---mistake?".
I promise, once the mad men, imbeciles, and infants who currently run our country are sent back to the brush, oil patch, or corporate boardrooms they came from, I'll stop posting the outrage of the day, and write something a little more novel. Please let that be January 2005?
In the meantime, though, here's a critique of blogging that, although it mostly misses the point of the enterprise, has this useful warning:
On reflection, it does seem a bit dangerous to have a forum where you can rebut anyone you like, about any subset of his argument, without much fear of being called on any of your own mistakes.
So here's an idea: we should set up social institutions to try to check this problem, and keep bloggers honest and sharp. We could set up partnerships of blogs across ideological lines (or whatever divides argumentative blogs cross), in which a pair or more of blogs keep tabs on each other, and respectfully correct each other. The system won't work without a desire to understand each other better, but among writers who believe that competition makes for sharper analysis, this could do a world of good.
Instead, most of my time posting has been taken up with the insanity that is the Bush administration. Every week, I think I've seen it all, but there is always a new level of stupidity, greed, incompetence or depravity to reveal. If this were well understood and well covered by the mainstream media outlets, I'd leave them to it. But it seems that under Bush, it takes the effort of thousands of bloggers, pushing stories that otherwise might not make more than one news cycle, or get out of the wire round-up, into the public consciousness. Trent Lott's embrace of segregation is just the best example.
So I feel obliged to do my part, but only because the outrage is so palpable. Yet it irks me that so much of what needs to be told right now is black-and-white. It would be more fun to write of complex public issues, where I could get some serious value added out of my social science training. Instead, we've got burning "questions" like "torture, right or wrong?" or "ignoring al-Qaeda pre 9-11---mistake?".
I promise, once the mad men, imbeciles, and infants who currently run our country are sent back to the brush, oil patch, or corporate boardrooms they came from, I'll stop posting the outrage of the day, and write something a little more novel. Please let that be January 2005?
In the meantime, though, here's a critique of blogging that, although it mostly misses the point of the enterprise, has this useful warning:
The entries, sometimes updated hourly, are little spasms of assertion, usually too brief for an argument ever to stand a chance of developing layers of meaning or ramifying into qualification and complication. There's a constant sense that someone (almost always the blogger) is winning and someone else is losing. Everything that happens in the blogosphere — every point, rebuttal, gloat, jeer, or "fisk" (dismemberment of a piece of text with close analytical reading) — is a knockout punch. A curious thing about this rarefied world is that bloggers are almost unfailingly contemptuous toward everyone except one another.
On reflection, it does seem a bit dangerous to have a forum where you can rebut anyone you like, about any subset of his argument, without much fear of being called on any of your own mistakes.
So here's an idea: we should set up social institutions to try to check this problem, and keep bloggers honest and sharp. We could set up partnerships of blogs across ideological lines (or whatever divides argumentative blogs cross), in which a pair or more of blogs keep tabs on each other, and respectfully correct each other. The system won't work without a desire to understand each other better, but among writers who believe that competition makes for sharper analysis, this could do a world of good.
