The simple experience of being able to directly broadcast my own words to readers was an exhilarating literary liberation.This is kind of a big deal. Never before have so few people with so little money been able to reach out to such a wide and broad audience. Everyone uses the internet to some degree. Some, such as my mother, only uses the great series of tubes to look at e-mail and do shopping. Others, such as myself, I suppose, use it much more heavily and broadly. I ingest media with a fervor saved only for cats and their cheezburgers. There are millions like me; us; and we like reading things. Authors sometimes tend to enjoy to writing things. It's win-win for everyone.
Of course, Sullivan tends towards a more... utopian view of this arrangement. Where the commentors act in concert with the blogger, and together they form a more perfect union. With the readers help, the blogger can fact check whatever he writes. With the blogger's help, the readers can help to broaden the blog's purview and add to the general discourse in a meaningful manner. This definitely happens! Somewhere. More often though, the blogger and the reader aren't... necessarily friendly. Something happens with the anonymity of the internet, and some people are.... not as polite as they could be. John Gruber, author of Daring Fireball, said it best in this post:
Comments, at least on popular websites, aren’t conversations. They’re cacophonous shouting matches.
Honestly, I agree with Sullivan about many things in his piece. The ephemeral nature of works on the internet, the strange new world we've all been thrust into regardless of what we did or didn't want, the fun it is to post on THE INTERNETS. I will disagree about the role of the reader though. In a conversation where, at any time, a picture of a cat stuck in a box or a link to any given video (Now in topical humor edition!), isn't much of a conversation. While it all depends on where you're posting and who you're posting to, the commentor/blogger relationship seems fragile, tenuous, at best.
Good point about the Utopian perspective offered by Sullivan-aren't we all when something works for us?
ReplyDeletewho determines what a "valuable" conversation is in the blog-o-sphere?
I'm not necessarily arguing that the Utopian perspective is bad (except when I am), just that it's flawed when it doesn't take into account flaws inherent in the system. Yeah, Wikipedia is a fantastic resource that everyone can edit to create an ever updating bibliographic source on everything. On the other hand, it's a resource that everyone can edit regardless of their abilities, one that isn't necessarily policed as heavily or proficiently as it should be. Comments can add to a story spectacularly. Likewise, they can detract and distract so much simpler.
ReplyDeleteAs for determining value, that's a trick. The ultimate value judgement will depend nearly entirely on the reader. If they want to read your words, then they will and they will find what they want to. If they don't find value, they'll go somewhere else. That's a fairly simplistic view, yes, but applying Occam's Razor generally tends to lead to simple answers.
Of course, if you view the blog as the author's personal space, then they can easily determine what the "valuable" conversation is on their own. At which point they can delete comments that don't fit with their notion of how the conversation is flowing. This would allow the blogger to still allow comments, without having to worry about conversation going off in a wildly off topic direction. Alternatively, the blogger could just disable comments and let their writings stand on their own (Again, see Daring Fireball), perhaps along with a metric ton of hyperlinks. That gives the blogger ultimate control over their own personal space.
tl;dr: While the blogger has control over which conversations they will and will not allow, the reader will decide if they like the way conversation is going well enough to choose whether they want to read or not.