NYT reporter David Greenberg recently spent a week guest-blogging for Daniel Drezner, and his article on the experience gave Corante’s Suw Charman serious pause for concern. Charman quotes Drezner, then rebuts him:
Serious bloggers, I realized, aggressively report a pet issue, updating
their sites throughout the day. They scavenge the Internet for every
shard of information on a hot topic, like John R. Bolton’s chances of
becoming ambassador to the United Nations or Tom DeLay’s ethical
troubles.‘Serious bloggers’? What does that mean? Are the
people who aren’t fixated on the spike of the power curve automatically
dilettantes? I don’t like this division. I always thought that the
appealing thing about blogging was that it isn’t a medium that submits
to being split up thusly. It’s not healthy for us to start believing
that such divisions even exist because they don’t – it’s all in our
perceptions – and by creating these divisions we forget and devalue the
fact that blogging centres around individual bloggers and the
conversations that they are having. We don’t talk about ‘serious’
telephone users, so why talk about ‘serious’ bloggers?
Amen. This is an important point that’s in danger of being lost as organizations start taking blogging, uh, seriously. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Blogs aren’t just another "channel" for your "message". It’s not about broadcasting; it’s about conversations (in Cluetrain’s sense of the word.) It’s not about having an audience; it’s about making connections. Ultimately, it’s not even about blogs as a platform (because the web as a whole is becoming more "bloggish"); it’s about blogging as an activity, a way of being online (a insightful distinction Marnie Webb made during our recent "Blogs Are Obsolete" discussion.)
But I also want to make a point in Greenberg’s defense. People who are unfamiliar with blogs tend to think of them not only as highly personal and subjective, but also as overly broad and intellectually shallow. Charman rightly takes Greenberg to task on the first issue–blogs are appealing and compelling precisely because they speak in a personal and subjective voice. That doesn’t make them un-serious; that makes them authentic.
But I don’t think Greenberg’s wrong to suggest a distinction between bloggers who focus on a set of issues they know well (i.e. they take them "seriously"), and those who write more superficially on a wider range of issues. This doesn’t mean that only "experts" have a right to take part in these conversations; the beauty of the blogosphere is its openness to intellectual entrepreneurialism and its meritocratic dismissal of credentials. But Greenberg’s stint as a guest-blogger opened his eyes to the fact that quite a few "amateurs" are as highly informed as any "expert," and by calling them "serious," I think he meant to credit their depth, not to belittle other bloggers.
My solution is to use this site to discuss a particular set of issues–design, technology, advocacy and marketing, just like it says on the wrapper–that I think about every day, that I grapple with professionally, that I have strong feelings about, and that I want to talk about with others. All the other stuff I like to write about, but don’t necessarily feel the need to debate–from CD reviews to my latest home improvement project–goes up on a personal site.
Both sites are personal, subjective and authentically mine. But I take this one more seriously, and I would expect to be taken more seriously on the topics discussed here. If you don’t like Aimee Mann or Haywood, well, that’s no skin off my nose. But if you don’t like my take on, say, Seth Goldstein, them’s fightin’ words.
4 Responses
Great post Ed! I just finished another interview with a nonprofit blogger (will post shortly) and the word authentic came up again. Something to add to the definition of blogging.
Do you think there is a correlation between professional versus personal sites and depth?
I don’t think so. There are plenty of poorly done, shallow “professional” sites, and plenty of well-informed, rich “personal” sites. I think it’s a question of focus and style. Few people have the skills to write in depth on a broad range of topics, so spreading yourself too thin is a real problem–better to focus on a set of topics you’re truly passionate about. And by “style” I mean essentially A) longer, original essays, or B) shorter links to other sources. I don’t think one’s better than the other–the web needs both–but you’ll be a better writer if you find the style that’s best suited to your voice.
The issue I take with this use of the word ‘serious’ is that it passes a value judgement, and I am not sure that that value judgement is valid in blogging.
If you consider wide-interest blogs, such as political, tech or professional blogs which may draw a larger audience as ‘serious’ then the rest of them, blogs of smaller audiences and more limited interest must perforce be ‘non-serious’, but I have to ask, serious to whom? Do we consider knitting blogs ‘non-serious’? If so, why are there so many of them? Does a poetry blog with half a dozen readers count as non-serious? Even if the people writing and reading it take it seriously?
Serious is, I think, entirely the wrong word because of the connotations that serious = worthy and non-serious = worthless. It’s the same sort of distinction as professional vs. amateur. We’ve lost the real meanings of those two words in a welter of value judgements, that professional is somehow better, and amateur is perforce sloppy and ill-educated. (Conveniently forgetting, of course, that the world’s best sports people are all amateurs – you can’t be a professional and an Olympian. Equally, most good blogs are written by people who are not paid to write them.)
I dislike the use of the word ‘serious’ blogger because it devalues those who blog to just a few people about issues that are of interest ostensibly only to them and their immediate community (although one can never tell who might find value in even local or personal issues). Those people make up the bulk of the blogosphere, and what is important is not the size of their audience or their erudition, but the benefits that blogging confers on them as individuals and on their audience as the community with which they are conversing.
Thanks for the comment, Suw–it’s very nice to have you here. Three points in response:
1) I’m in full agreement with you that neither subject matter nor number of readers makes a blog “serious,” and I’m not sure why you seem to think I would take issue with that position. My post didn’t suggest that, as you say, only “wide-interest blogs, such as political, tech or professional blogs which may draw a larger audience” are “serious” or that blogs on knitting or poetry or any other subject are “non-serious.” The distinction I drew was simply between writers who focus on issues they know well and those who don’t.
2) Again, I’m in agreement that “professional” and “amateur” are meaningless distinctions in this context and don’t provide any indication of a writer’s worth. But that’s precisely what I meant by lauding the blogosphere’s “openness to intellectual entrepreneurialism and its meritocratic dismissal of credentials.” I muddied the waters by saying that I write here on issues “that I grapple with professionally,” but by that I meant that my job gives me not a unique license to speak with authority, but rather a range of real-life opportunities to put theories into practice. I should have been more clear.
So far, so good–we’re in agreement that a blog’s subject matter, its number of readers, and its author’s profession or credentials have nothing to do with its quality. However…
3) Your refusal to make any value judgments about the quality of writing or thought in a particular blog strikes me as unhelpful in the extreme. What is a blogroll but a set of value judgments about other blogs? Corante’s Get Real, where I read your original post, has a blogroll of about 30 “Usual Suspects.” In essence, this list is saying, “We endorse these writers; they’re good and thoughtful and relevant to our own work.” I’d say, “They’re serious,” although I understand your objections to the word’s connotations. But no matter what words you choose, value judgments are being made. And that’s not an unhealthy attempt to quash personal expression by prioritizing some blogs over others–it’s a laudable attempt to help people increase the signal-to-noise ratio in their online experience by focusing attention on blogs whose writers are putting, uh, serious time, effort and thought into their work.