According to a post on First Things, blogging is generally something that cheapens language and isn’t very helpful. Apparently “The blogpost is biased toward speed, brevity, and cleverness. It thus hands the public square over to bullies, sophists, and clowns.”
Take that, public square. I never knew bloggers had so friggin much power.
Now, I’ve certainly commented previously on the very real limits of blogging as a genre. But to claim that an alleged bias toward “speed, brevity, and cleverness” is a bad thing seems rather odd. What would be the alternative? To be biased toward slowness, verbosity, and dim-wittedness? This reads more like simple ressentiment from someone who has a bone to pick with people he things are faster and cleverer than he.
The article also hints that blogging will somehow make it hard for you to read or write longer things, like books. I find this to be one of the weirdest notions of all. Most bloggers I read seem to read a great many more books than the average person, and they tend to write more things outside of their blogposts than most people I know. Now, to be sure, there are certainly hordes of blog commentors out there who fit these sorts of pejorative descriptions. But we’ve known about that for ages and thats another matter altogether.
So to sum up, aside from the irony of attcking blogging via something that look pretty much exactly like a blog post, it turns out that the author just doesn’t really have a clue what he’s talking about.
Well put brother Halden.
Actually, it was quite fitting that the Retired Pastor response cited your blog in response to this. People who drone on about the evils of blogging seem to avoid reading blogs that are actually good.
Its like complaining about newspapers on the basis of The Daily Oklahoman.
to claim that an alleged bias toward “speed, brevity, and cleverness” is a bad thing seems rather odd. What would be the alternative? To be biased toward slowness, verbosity, and dim-wittedness?
Stop being clever, smartass. ;)
The really interesting question is whether I’m a bully, a sophist, or clown? Can one be all three? I hope so.
I think you’re at least two parts clown to each part bully or sophist (unless you’re talking about Piper or Driscoll, in which case the ratios may shift a bit).
I see. I need to up my bullying. Good to know.
To be fair, even if some of his points aren’t made in the most articulate way, I think there is a general force to some of them. At least in an anecdotal sense, I spend a lot less time reading books, because when I have a chunk of time less than 30 minutes or so, I’ll spend it perusing the blogosphere, getting much of the same sort of stimulation I would get reading a book, but in a condensed (and usually less intellectually rigorous) way. Now… this is a personal probably to a large extent, but I think that in many cases, time spent diddling on the internet comes at the expense of time that would have been spent in a book otherwise, that is, for certain types of people.
I have also noticed, in reflecting on my own life, that having grown up in “information poor” conditions, namely prior to the existence of the internet as we know it, I developed a voracity for information such that when I found something interesting, I immediately moved to consume it. I then began the hunt again. There was a considerable amount of effort involved in this sort of endeavor.
Now, with the nearly infinite amount of information available online, and the ability to answer virtually any public factual question via web searching, the desire to follow every lead to its end and pursue every opportunity for learning creates a borderline pathological situation at times. I’m still working on this. My point is just that minds that were formed in an information scarce age (most of the people reading this blog fall into the category or are borderline cases) can react in strange ways to the brave new world of the internet. What will be interesting is to see how generations that take the age of Google for granted are formed, and if there is any truth to my theory of the historical context of certain internet-related pathologies.
My main response is that reading blogs writing a blog myself has certainly encouraged me to read all the more. Not only am I exposed to great books, I also feel more compelled to share what I’m reading, which serves to increase my rate of reading (generally because i don’t know hardly of anyone who I can talk to about theology on a serious level). Also, her comment about speedy, brevity, and cleverness seems to miss out on an important aspect of blogging: time-delay. Certainly people can hide behind pseudonyms and take cheap shots from afar. But this nostalgia for public forum doesn’t grasp that when engaging the blogosphere one has time to ruminate, consider, and write. If you don’t have something constructive to say or if you need time you can always return later to respond. It can help to minimize asshole responses, and as we all know from town hall meetings from the latest election it turns out bullies often show up.
So, I apologize for the meta-comment, but perhaps if I had actually spent time editing and waiting to respond there wouldn’t have been numerous grammatical errors in my previous post. Mea culpa.
I think Hill hits on the real problem here… or rather, the blessing/curse, because really it’s both. It’s the saturation of dialogue and information that makes sustained processing and thought so different on the internet than in other contexts. The resulting opportunities are a good thing, to be sure, but they can also unknowingly retrain even thoughtful bloggers into unhelpful habits. I’m willing to criticize the blogging or other such practices as far as that goes.
As am I. And indeed I have.
Halden-
How can I get a subscription to your Daily Oklahoman blog?
-Okie from Muskogee
I’d say we should do a for and against First Thing’s blog, but that’d probably end up only being against, and boring, if not a waste of time. Why are ‘we’ still reading them?
I realize I’m jumping in a bit late here, but I just wanted to throw in another piece of anecdotal support for theo-blogging (though not without some reservations).
I’m in an in-between year before grad studies in theology while my wife finishes school. Being somewhat disconnected from the academic setting, blogs like this one have helped guide my reading plan while out of the classroom. Forgive my tendencies as a lurker, but simply observing meaningful theological discourse by those several steps ahead in theological education has been highly instructive to me (maybe someone should write a book “Theo-blogging as Faithful Discipleship” – perhaps Zondervan would publish it).
That said, it seems that McDaniel’s case would only be relevant to someone who reads blogs as a substitute for articles and monographs. I see blogs as a city bus of sorts – a bit messy inside with a fair share of dubious characters; not a great way to experience a city if you stay inside it the entire time, but a great vehicle to help you get to places you wouldn’t access otherwise.
Halden, thank you for your work here.
obliged,
Matt
First Things cheapens grace. So to hell with what they have to say about anybody’s blog.