I’m generally not a fan of blogs. Since being assigned the
maintenance of this blog as part of a class on new media, I’ve been
sporadically thinking about the reasoning behind my distaste. It’s because of
this that I found Rebecca Blood’s interview with political and tech blogger
Scott Rosenberg quite interesting.
One of my criticisms of blogging as a platform is that most
of the time I’d rather just read a full-fledged website for my news,
commentary, and whatnot. But in the very outset of the interview, Rosenberg
makes an excellent point in the defense of blogs that I’d never given a whole
lot of thought: in a blog, the personality of the author has a lot more
opportunity to bleed through, both in their style of writing and the things
they choose to write about. The community-based nature of blogs lets you find
other people with similar personalities and interests as well. Unfortunately,
that can be more of a curse than a blessing. It can be easy to only expose
yourself to opinions that validate your own, and Rosenberg himself says that he
has difficulty reading blogs written from viewpoints that oppose his own.
Rosenberg’s other statements about why one should maintain a
blog make perfect sense to me – from the perspective of the author. As
Rosenberg writes for Salon, and has authored a book, I can see why he enjoys
having an outlet for small bits of writing in between, and he cites personal
pleasure as an excellent reason to write blog posts. What I don’t understand is
why a reader would necessarily choose to read small bits of thought designed to
catch the eye of notoriously flighty blog readers over longer and often more
thought-provoking pieces. Not to say that blogs can’t be thought-provoking. I just don’t think the medium lends
itself particularly well to thought-provoking.
Lastly, the nature of blogs as collections of large numbers
of small bits of information can sometimes make them harder to consume, the
opposite of their intended effect. Rosenberg mentions how the wealth of daily
posts on the tech blog Engadget makes the blog almost impossible to follow. I
used to follow Engadget, and I have on more than one occasion found myself with
upwards of 500 unread posts in my RSS reader. That kind of information overload
is the exact reason I stopped reading Engadget.
Maybe writing my own blog posts will change my tune, but
Rosenberg has failed to.
Nice post, Andrew. I used to think about blogs very much the way you do. I didn't like the fact blogs emphasized ephemera and were so hastily (and sloppily) written. Like you, I much preferred the more polished articles you get in magazines, journals and newspapers. That said, what ultimately won me over was exactly what Rosenberg likes so much about the platform: that they have personality. I am one of those people who always turn to the opinions columnists first when I pick up my copy of the Chicago Tribune or the New York Times. No doubt, the fact that I myself was once a columnist has something to do with my fondness for the genre. And the wonderful thing about blogs is they allow everyone to have their very own opinions column.
ReplyDeleteI agree with all of that, but the one thing that makes blogs worse (again, with a mind to thoughtful content) than opinion columns is their expected turnover rate. Most people expect extremely frequent posts from the blogs they follow, which doesn't exactly encourage the author to edit or rethink their posts.
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