We expect blogs to provide us with new information--heavy emphasis on the new--and it sometimes seems that we judge bloggers on their ability to quickly spit out chunks of prose and move on to the next topic. But this rapid-fire aspect of the medium raises the question: Are blogs inimical to serious thought? Virginia Postrel seems to think so, but Grant McCracken respectfully disagrees.
Postrel writes:
Current-affairs blogging of the Sullivan/Instapundit/name your favorite type is inherently quick, dirty, and disposable. It may add to the public discourse, but it doesn't tend to deepen the blogger's own thinking. That, plus sheer laziness, is why this blog has never promised more than a few posts a week, and why I've given up my think-magazine-editor instincts to voice an opinion on everything. For a full-blown argument, I want to write something for a sizable audience and get paid. And I don't really want to post half-baked ones.
McCracken counters:
Virginia is concerned that there is a certain "hit and run" quality to the exercise that fails to "deepen the blogger's own thinking" on the topic at hand. Bloggers are, to shift the metaphor, in danger of remaining the short order cooks of the intellectual world.
Let me begin by acknowledging the problem. It’s a problem. Blogging taxes me the way a particular university Dean used to do. It interrupts just enough each day to prevent certain kinds of intellectual activity.
But [at] the risk of blowing my own horn, I think I have a way of solving this problem.
My head works a little like a lazy susan. I never know what topic will catch my attention, but I have noticed that there is, finally, a limited set of topics that do. Something in Virginia's blog, the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times spins the lazy susan each day and, before I know it, I am working on one of my defacto themes...
...When I look at the posts all at once, I am interested to see that while I repeat my themes, I don’t repeat my approach to them. As a result, the posts end up piecing together a multi-dimensional view, I would not [have] managed were I to treat the topic head-on and all-at-once. Yes, things overlap, but they do so in that interesting post-modern way where one image is made out of many images. This is, in short, a good way to think. It may be a better way to think than head-on and all-at-once contemplation...
..[P]osts accumulate. And, when brought together, they begin to network. Created discretely, they begin to interact with one another. Larger themes, and posts, begin to emerge. Before we know it, we’ve got a book on our hands. Or at least a larger constellation of some kind.
Postrel's put her finger on an important dilemma--many, if not most blogs are "quick, dirty and disposable," and few of them contribute to the public discourse as effectively as Andrew Sullivan and Instapundit do. But McCracken's approach seems like a surefire way to avoid falling into that trap: Limit yourself to a set of topics, post on them regularly, and address them from multiple perspectives.
I've adopted that approach here on this site, where I've defined my territory as "design, technology, advocacy and marketing." That's broad enough to give me plenty of room to work, but focused enough to allow me to (hopefully) return to certain themes regularly and deepen my thinking over time. (I've also created an escape hatch on my "personal site," Viva Batista, where I give myself free rein to write about anything from politics to music to HTML tricks--topics of great interest to me, but also ones that would dilute my focus here.)
And I'd argue that the individual bloggers I read each day--see my Heavy Rotation blogroll in the right-hand sidebar--have also chosen this approach. McCracken describes his own blog as "sitting at the intersection of anthropology and economics." Jeff Jarvis and Radley Balko tackle politics, foreign policy and the media. And Seth Godin and Postrel herself focus on business, marketing and design issues. I see all of these bloggers using the medium to deepen their thinking on their chosen themes, and I don't think anyone could describe their work as "disposable."
