Pundit or Poet?

Posted on September 13, 2002 in Blogging

This is yet another article with which I am unhappy as I write it. The trouble here is that I’ve taken on someone with a superficially clear position and a formula for success. Success is always attractive. I’ve striving here to describe how a particular formula in, itself, may lead to failure.

Here’s the trap that I verge and maybe fall into: I challenge the idea that one needs to include alternative opinions to have a good blog. This puts me in danger of making the erroneous claim that you don’t need to entertain alternative opinions at all. To save myself, I say that if you honestly look around, you’ll find plenty of differences in the views of those who superficially seem identical to your view. Furthermore, controversy is not the only aim of blog. The best bloggers write about things they know about, namely their own minds. You need to test these against the hard wood and sharps stones of reality, but even more importantly, you must vividly and honestly describe what those views are before you can even begin to make the test. I think too many bloggers skip over themselves and write too much about the news.

I feel like I am waving a limp plastic sword at a dragon who kills by boredom. Tomorrow I’ll try to find something vivid to write about.

Cinnamon has become enamored of a book about blogs written by a journalism professor named Rebecca Blood. She hasn’t read it yet, but she thinks she’s been converted to the cause of including links to sites that she disagrees with. She quotes Blood happily: “closed minds and heavy-handed insults masquerade as vigorous discussion.”

This is true, as anyone who had spent time on the Dalnet #politics channel can attest. I can’t honestly say, however, that all this exposure to people who simply sling mud has helped expand me into a more thoughtful person. If anything, it has made me short-tempered and curt. I spend less time thinking through my philosophy. And, when I engage in debate, I often find myself accused of positions that I don’t hold (e.g. that I believe that everything Bill Clinton does is good). In some ways, the punditry that I engage in over at Dalnet #politics narrows my thinking if I do not ignore the entirely wacko and confrontational opinions of some. I have deeper conversations with friends such as snaily because, for one thing, she lives by certain rules of reciprocal courtesy. Though I have defended her many times, snaily holds a few views with which I disagree. She’s a far cry from being Ann Coulter, but nevertheless I feel that exploring the differences I have with her are far more enlightening than jumping into the dog and pony shows conducted by the mainstream media.

Another problem I have with the description of the Blood book as described by cinnamon is its narrow and formulaic approach to weblogs. I asked cinnamon:

Who do I quote as an opposing source when I describe clouds ramming into my hilltop or the color of the flowers appearing on my cactus?

Blood, it seems to me, seems to promote the value that there is only one kind of writing for weblogs that is legitimate and that is political. Bloggers, Blood contends, should not only be bound by the same conventions as journalists, but only write news like articles about compelling issues of the day. I sigh and remember how smirks described #news_garden as a “gladiator pit” where opposing views were set off for the entertainment of the ops. Very little constructive conversation resulted from this encounter when people saw themselves only as avatars of a truth and defenders of a point of view.

Is it necessary to remind people that blogs are not newspapers? I don’t share Blood’s disappointment that the webloggers I read aren’t providing me with links to hate sites. I don’t read them for the news. I read them as letters — as an expression of a person who is struggling in this world. Some of the most dishonest and uninteresting blog entries, in my opinion are those that make a brief comment and make a link somewhere. “Me tooism” or “Me notism” — what I call the lightswitch mentality — is the real problem here. The trouble isn’t the lack of links to sites we disagree with: the problem is insufficiently examining ourselves.

You can’t, of course, test yourself without granting audience to opinions from the outside. But far more often what I see are people who do what they think are the mandatory backflips and think they have done “the right thing”. What I miss most when I read pieces in newspapers is how rigorously the person has been disguised or outright excluded from the piece. I think we learn a lot by seeing the witness.

Bloggers who make it a religion to link to contrary sites can be every bit as dull and uninspirational as folks who only include the opinions of their friends. They suffer from the same problem: unidimensionality. Great blogs, I feel, offer many the reader many avenues into a human heart. A entry in a blog isn’t an article: it’s part of a letter to the world. This is what I think Blood is failing to understand. And I can’t say that I fully understand how I go about it, either. I can say this: each day, I keep tweaking with the conditions of the experiments that I run. My readers who have followed me to this end, may wonder what I preach as a substitute. Simply this: tell the truth about what you think and what you see. Good blog is a bit like The Picture of Dorian Grey: there’s no moral, just art. And yet does not the art say a lot about the decisions that lead one towards good or towards evil, about being in this world with its issues and conflicts? Strive to write well is what I say. Strive simply to tell the truth.

See the comments for important corrections and redirection of the sentiments in this piece. — Joel, posted at 4:55 pm on September 13 2002.