It’s Blog! (It’s Great for a Snack, It Fits on Your Back)*
*Apologies to readers either too young or too old to recognize Ren and Stimpy’s “Log” song.
Imagine my joy today when I saw that Alan Jacobs—skilled essayist, fellow Shetland Sheepdog fan, and all-around delightful person—has just published an essay on the topic of blogs in Books and Culture.
Jacobs relates his own experience reading in the blogosphere, with its attendant thrills and frustrations. The main feature defining blogs, he argues, is their immediacy: they present ideas and news items quickly and then move on. Therefore, he concludes, “Blogs remain great for news: political, technological, artistic, whatever. And they provide a very rich environment in which news (or rather “news”) can be tested and evaluated and revised. . . .But as vehicles for the development of ideas they are woefully deficient and will necessarily remain so unless they develop an architecture that is less bound by the demands of urgency—or unless more smart people refuse the dominant architecture.”
Now, I’m still learning the architecture of the blog genre. Porpoise is continually pointing out that the length of my posts exceeds that of most bloggers’ posts—and I might conclude that my blog readers are an unusual breed, too, since some of you (Ahem, Pop Otter. Ahem, Possum.) write responses even longer than my original posts. In my case, I certainly won’t equate length with depth of idea development. But I have to say that, for me, relative brevity and urgency are the two most appealing differences about blog-writing, as compared to any other kind of writing I do. I have an immediate audience who immediately responds, so I feel like my writing actually impacts people, albeit in miniscule ways. Furthermore, I get to express half-baked ideas that would never make it to paper if I had to back them up with extensive proofs and examples. The evidence may be out there, but if I had to find it, I would lose motivation.
But, on the flip side, I do feel the time pressure Jacobs mentions. What if I only see a movie after everyone else has finished talking about it? It’s as if relevance suddenly has an expiration date.
However, expiration date or not, I enjoy my blog snacks (reading as well as writing). They’re not full meals, but, as I think Jacobs would agree, they fill an important function in the contemporary exchange of information. As Porpoise knows, I like my meals, but I can get awfully grumpy if I have to wait too long in between them. Thus, the instant gratification of snacks.
But I’ll be very happy when I get to feast on the next volume of Jacobs’ essays (If you haven’t read his latest collection, Shaming the Devil, shame on you. Get thee to a library.)
P.S. I should also mention that my blogging experience has been unusually positive so far mostly because I have a small cadre of intelligent, informed, and courteous (if argumentative) readers. I’ve only had one “troll” since I began The Ottery, and since this troll was trying to argue that he was the Messiah (I’m not kidding), I could pretty easily dismiss him.
4 comments June 13th, 2006