Sunday Reading: Blogs

This week's NY Review of Books has a terrific piece on blogs by Sarah Boxer. She describes the difficulty of trying to come up with an anthology of writing from blogs: that the linkiness of blogs make them nearly impossible to reproduce in paper form:

Every sport, every war, every hurricane brings out a crop of bloggers, who often outdo the mainstream media in timeliness, geographic reach, insider information, and obsessive detail. You can read about the Iraq war from Iraqi bloggers, from American soldiers (often censored now), or from scholars like Juan Cole, whose blog, Informed Comment, summarizes, analyzes, and translates news from the front. For opera, to take another example, you have Parterre Box, which is kind of campy, or Sieglinde's Diaries and My Favorite Intermissions, written by frequent Met-goers, or Opera Chic, a Milan-based blog focused on La Scala (which followed in great detail the scandal of Roberto Alagna's walkout during Aida a year ago). And that doesn't begin to cover it.

With such riches to choose from, you might think it would be a snap to put a bunch of blogs into a book and call it an anthology. And you would be wrong. The trouble? Links—those bits of highlighted text that you click on to be transported to another blog or another Web site. (Links are the Web equivalent of footnotes, except that they take you directly to the source.) It's not only that the links are hard to transpose into print. It's that the whole culture of linking—composing on the fly, grabbing and posting whatever you like, making weird, unexplained connections and references— doesn't sit happily in a book. Yes, I'm talking about bloggy writing itself.

Boxer does a great job in this article of discussing the history of blog writing, and describing the uniqueness of blogwriting. In particular, Boxer explains the chummy and personal nature of much blog writing, the sense you get of being "in the know" if you are reading. She makes a terrific analogy here:

Political blogs are among the trickiest to capture in a book because they tend to rely heavily on links and ephemeral information. But even blogs that have few or no links still show the imprint of the Web, its associative ethos, and its obsession with connection—the stink of the link. Blogs are porous to the world of texts and facts and opinions on line. (And this is probably as close as I can come to defining an essence of blog writing.)

Bloggers assume that if you're reading them, you're one of their friends, or at least in on the gossip, the joke, or the names they drop. They often begin their posts mid-thought or mid-rant—in medias craze. They don't care if they leave you in the dust. They're not responsible for your education. Bloggers, as Mark Liberman, one of the founders of the blog called Language Log, once noted, are like Plato. :-) The unspoken message is: Hey, I'm here talking with my buddies. Keep up with me or don't. It's up to you. Here is the beginning of Plato's Republic:

I went down yesterday to the Peiraeus with Glaucon, the son of Ariston, to pay my devotions to the Goddess, and also because I wished to see how they would conduct the festival since this was its inauguration.
Wait a second! Who is Ariston? What Goddess? What festival?

And here, for comparison's sake, is a passage from Julia {Here Be Hippogriffs}, a blog about motherhood and infertility:

Having left Steve to his own devices for the past three days I am being heavily pressured to abandon the internet (you! he wants me to abandon you!) and come downstairs to watch SG-1 with him....
So this will have to be quick. Vite! Aprisa aprisa!
I went to Blogher. It was rather fun and rather ridiculous and I am quite glad I went although I do not know if I would ever go again. One thing of note for my infertile blogging friends: DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT IT. Do not go. Do not ever ever go to Blogher.

Huh? Who's Steve? What's Blogher? A blog? (No.) A mothers' club? (No.) A blogging conference? (Yes.)

You get the point. Bloggers breeze through places, people, texts, and blogs that you might or might not know without providing any helpful identification. They figure that even if they don't provide you with links you can get all the background you need by Googling unfamiliar terms, clicking through Wikipedia (the collaborative on-line encyclopedia) or searching their blog's archives.

I experienced something similar on the site The Agonist yesterday. Take a look at this post by Sean Paul Kelley:

Note that the blogger in question doesn't name names. Just fuzzy concepts. Many of us have been right, far too right for the cheerleaders' comfort. But human nature is what it is, people are forgiven for making mistakes, but for being right? Never.

Now, I haven't reproduced the links, and you'll have to click through to the Agonist site to get them. But the post is a perfect example of what Boxer is talking about: there is a quick post, referring to two other posts, which have to be read, as though they are extended footnotes, in order to understand the point Kelley is making. It's one of the things that make blog reading occasionally frustrating (I find Atrios, for example, annoying on this point--he rarely includes in his own post the information he is referring to, and reading him requires constant back and forth between other sites) but also what makes reading blogs fun. The interconnectedness of the blog world is endlessly fascinating. It's as if in the middle of reading one book or magazine you can make another book or magazine instantly appear, and back again.

What Boxer leaves out, I think, is the recognition that the blogosphere gives voice to many, many terrific writers who otherwise wouldn't get to be read as widely as they are. I am thinking of writers like Digby, a brilliant analyst who might not ever have been published, or at least not as widely, in traditional media.

Boxer's article is definitely worth reading if you are a fan or writer of blogs.