In the November issue of The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan offers us “Why I Blog”, an extended meditation upon this still-emerging form. Although Sullivan cut his teeth in the world of print, he knows what he’s talking about. He made the leap in 2000 and is the personality behind The Daily Dish.
Given the dynamic nature of the blog, why can’t I post a comment to his article? I can read it. I can digg it. I can email it to a friend. I can del.icio.us it. But I can’t do the one thing that (according to Sullivan) really matters. I want to tell him what I think, but I have to resort to emailing him a link to my response rather than simply responding.
Sullivan points to some of the facts of the blog as a medium:
• it’s a backwards narrative;
• its immediacy exposes the author (and reveals the author’s personality) like never before;
• it’s a broadcast, not a publication, so you have to keep broadcasting for your blog to work;
• instant feedback through comments and email keep writers accountable and have made blogging more, not less, reliable;
• hypertext allows linking to source material so fact-checking has evolved in a completely different direction than the time-consuming procedures of print media.
But Sullivan exposes his bias in print as readily as he does on his blog.
Sullivan says: “Like any new form, blogging did not start from nothing. It evolved from various journalistic traditions.” The bias of a journalist is immediately evident: only facts count. However, most blogs fly under a journalist’s radar, because their purposes and audience are too focused for news gatherers. Photoblogs and vlogs show up the conflict at work here. Blogging is a “platform” not a medium. Journalism is a medium, photography is a medium, the novel is a medium, video is a medium. You can mix media. You can have photojournalism and graphic novels. If you want to call blogging a medium, then at the very least, you have to acknowledge that its content is always a mixed media presentation. It’s a news blog, or an art blog, or a music blog, or a manga blog, or a theoblog.
As Sullivan points out, one of the features (limitations?) of the blogging platform is its reverse timeline. For those of us who blog on spiritual issues, this gives rise to a kind of dissonance. We like to think of ourselves as purveyors of permanence, but find ourselves undermined with every post we make. Even so, we emphatically reject the label “journalist,” yet embrace the platform as one in a wide array of communication tools.
Here’s the other statement that grates on my ears: “If all this sounds postmodern, that’s because it is. And blogging suffers from the same flaws as postmodernism: a failure to provide stable truth or a permanent perspective.” This points to the very issue that creates a dissonance for spiritual blogs. However, it is inaccurate to describe this as a flaw of postmodernism. Postmodernism is descriptive, not prescriptive. Postmodernism merely presents claims about the way things are and strips away all the discursive practices and power plays we’ve nurtured in order to pretend things are otherwise.
There is no stable truth. There is no permanent perspective. Those are claims. Those are theories. To describe them as flaws is an evaluation and reveals another bias that one would expect from a print journalist. For all his work in blogging, Sullivan unwittingly reveals that he privileges print media. For him, impermanence is a flaw, not a fact, and so print is comforting, like Linus’s blanket.
To be fair, I succumb to the same bias. I blog. But I do my “real” writing as I work on my novel-in-progress, which will appear on paper between hard covers. It will be solid. It will sit on a bookshelf and maybe it will only ever gather dust, but at least the dust it gathers will be real dust.