[editor’s note, by gilgamesh] Gave it a less “negativistic” title and tone after some reflection.
Lately I often feel that bloggers and other people who express their “absolutely revolutionary and invaluable” opinions on blogs, forums and suchlike are just profoundly committed to the moral value of vanity, attention-mongering and narcissistic self-indulgence. They actually believe that they might accomplish something, for example, by harping on Jeff Gannon being invited into a White House press conference for the next 60 some-odd years, for example. Meanwhile, the whole thing was instantly dismissed by all professional journalists last year, of course. Not because the media is a conservative conspiracy (as the case of Rupert Murdoch’s alliance with the left-wing in Italy demonstrates, the media has just one very simple ideology: material profitability and sales), but because there is nothing there. If there were, the paid media would be all over it to gather more readers/ viewers/subscribers. Don’t you think??
Enough, though, let me ask you the question then: why do you all post, blog, forumize or whatever you want to call it?
What’s the point?? I remember someone asking this simple question on Daily Kos once and receiving over 900 comments. I kept track of the diary: almost 1,000 responses!!
So I expect to hear some answers on this.
Also, I include myself as one of the narcissistic and foolish self-indulgent usless idiots described above, of course. So absolutely no offense is intended.
Like many I think we’ve become so isolated, looking for humans who ‘think’ like we do and then Bush came and we all came out of the wood work.
I tired early in my computer years of message boards etc., but the blogs are very similar now. I use to love email- I seldom even do that with my friends anymore.
Then the MSM took a turn for no-news that CSPAN is now my main tv outlet.
We are starving for something that has been lost..I think.
I think there’s something in that. I might agree with you had you said that “We’re starving for something that has never really existed before: the ability for people who think alike to connect and communicate with each other just be choosing a certain Web site and commenting on it.”
But this leads to the problem of the echo-chamber: conservatives in their world, liberals in their world, etc.. Is this still useful?? I don’t know.
It use to be that one could talk to a ‘neighbor’ about most general things but the Fear Factor and being Politically correct has put a caution tape around us- At least blogging and the internet we can say any outrageous thing with anonymity and shock and awe attacks etc. and so are open to all kinds of insensitivity, false friendships, liars and alias-we don’t always know who the enemy is when blogging- sorry I’m rambling- but honest open people are often trampled on and over by the ‘faster typist’ so to speak-
In the beginning it felt useful but in the long run it’s just more of the same- ‘reality tv mentality’ versus the thinkersor metaphysicians (thinkers of life)… IMHO
[quote]
reality tv mentality’ versus the thinkersor metaphysicians (thinkers of life)… IMHO
[/quote]
It’s seems to me to trending that way as well. I thought it might have been just me actually.
The overwhelming compulsion to communicate manifest in blogging is so widespread a human trait in all aspects of life that I am inclined to consider it as being (in the vernacular of the day) “hard-wired”. This bid for connection and recognition would seem to be an end in itself, regardless of the content of the message. Narcissistic and self-indulgent behavior? At times, perhaps – but this is also an interactive process which gives rise to a community, which makes this political behavior as well.
And to be fair, for an activity that originates out of non-rational needs, the signal to noise ratio is amazingly strong. Presumably the community selects for quality of content (but this may just be my echo-chamber subjectivity 🙂 ).
And if this sounds far-fetched – I’m about to head into unwired and unwireless realms for two weeks, so I need to make the most of my last chance to self-indulge.
It is the need for COMMUNICATION and information.
and regarding the two weeks.. it will only hurt for a day, then enjoy the peace!
“It is the need for COMMUNICATION and information.”
I second that. It’s more like a ‘craving.’ Information comes first, because there are more readers than readers/posters.
We hear or read a headline, and we want more, we want some analysis, some background so we search for it on the blogs.
I’m not speaking for those who create blogs, just for the average person who participates in them.
I just read a long article by a New Orleans’ writer who returned to ‘occupied’ New Orleans, adopted two dogs, Sancha Panza and Clio, retrieved a few possessions, talked with the troops and the holdouts. I learned more from that article than I would from a falsely optimistic blurb produced by CNN.
Sounds like a zen paradox: the point is precisely the pointlessness.
People write because they enjoy it and what’s wrong with a little self-indulgence now and then, is another way to look at it. Plus, there is obviously [i] some sort [/i] of community aspect or most people wouldn’t bother, though I’m not sure how much and to what extent it really satisfies the innate need for community.
I’m not too sure about this though:
[quote]
the signal to noise ratio is amazingly strong. Presumably the community selects for quality [/quote]
There are so many gazzilions of blogs out there now, that I can’t imagine that much signal (even quality signal) even gets through all the noise. I’m thinking of the overall blogophere here and not any specific blogs or communities, of course.
I guess I was thinking less of zen than of the grooming behaviors of the (other) primates. Contact for contact’s sake on a symbolic level. But otherwise I think we pretty much agree on why people blog.
About the S/N … hmm… I think there are selection pressures at work in the blogosphere, such that people who write crap are going to be less noticed by (what they consider) the community of their peers than those who are better skilled and/or more diligent. My impression is that there are a lot of strong signals out there.
Of course, a great number, if not most of these signals are communicating messages that we here would consider nonsensical, unfounded, wacked out or flat-out abhorrent. Which of course raises the echo-chamber issue.
The grooming behaviors of other primates are usally motivated by recipricol (or biological) altruism: if I groom this other macaque now and thereby help to maintin his health and well-being and the probabality of progating his genes, then this is other macaque will be more likely to return the favor or do something else which will enhance my own adaptive fitness in the future.
So there are sort of selfish ulterior genetic motivations for that. Of course,the primates are not conscious of this.
It seems probably that we were genetically programmed to seek out contact because it was necesasray for our survival in the primiative environements of our ancestors. And now we do it for the its own sake: a sort of phenomenon of exaptation,like so much of the “extra” uses we make of consiousness and langauge in the modern world.
But I’m getting to philopsical here.
Sometimes I have to ask myself that question too. I think with blogging I am seeking a way to connect with like minded people of great diversity. I am seeking others opinions yet am open to to it not just being an echo chamber. I read more than I write and am really seeking to be better informed.
There are times though, just as in the “real world” whatever the hell that is these days, I need to seek balance. From time to time, I must unplug and take what I learn and put it into action, not just write about it. Whatever that means for each of us I am sure is different. Tracy and Brinnainneand Supersoling motivated me to go to Crawford. Through other blogs and websites I have learned what is going on locally. I attended my first meetup a week ago. Even though it was a huge disappointment and not what I was looking for I connected with another person looking for the same thing and now we are becoming friends.
Blogging got me involved instead of just saying oh well, there is nothing I can do about the situation. Sure there is ego and wonder when someone recommends a diary I wrote. But I really don’t write for recommends or post comments to see how many 4s I can get. I think the spiritual part of my being is just seeking the connectedness I once felt with others. Neighbors don’t talk to neighbors anymore. People are running around so fast and are so on the go it is mind boggling. I miss the days of my youth and the small town where everyone looked after each other and one could leave their doors wide open.
I blog also to just poor my hearache out and my anger and disappointments we all have felt so deeply these past few years. Each writer here contributes to my journey and for that I am deeply grateful.
You have come a long way my friend. And you have been very supportive of me in my ‘spouse of a louse’ mode LOL-
I desire your journey’s success for my spouse, but don’t know if I can hang on for all of it. Yes we stopped the drinking, now it’s the couch potato/shut out the real world addiction..no communication/resentment phase. phew..
I also long for the old neighborhoods and miss my old friends so much-most of them are in the keeping up with the Jones mode and I gave up material wants years ago for simpler things.
It is always a pleasure to see your posts Rosie. As I have told you before, you MUST take care of yourself. You know you cannot “fix” hubby. Drinking is but a symptom of the disease and the disaease is a famil illsness. If he refuses to seek support through AA or many other support groups out there and not work at the deep rooted problems that lead to alcoholism nothing will change. Help is not for those who need it, but for those who want it.
Thaanks for the very kind words.
Like many who were unable to leave New Orleans, many out here have difficult reasons when it comes to leaving also and sadly finances are the major reasons. So we ‘cope’ in other ways which kind of brings us back to the topic of this diary- one of my reasons for blogging LOL!
Having been a runner most of my life-quick to leave bad situations- it’s harder when one is older and disabled so I figure this is my chance to ‘fix’ many of my flaws, but on rough days the frustrations win out. On good days I progress.
And bringing it around to politics, like most of us here, we know the right thing to do but are pretty powerless at putting the right answers into fruition.
Ah, but that’s life in a ‘nut’shell. Gotta love the english language LMAO
That’s a very nicely expressed and powerful defense of blogging. I like your examples of forming frienships and actually getting involved [i]as a result of blogging[/i] too.
I can’t say the same for myself. But the problem is probably that I’m mostly posting on US blogs and I live in Italy. On the other hand, that possibility (of communicating about politcs in real time with people in the US) is amazing in itself compared to just a few years ago.
You said, “neigbors don’t communicat with neighbors”. But how much of that is, as many obverers suggest, caused by isolating ourselves in front of our CRTs instead of going out and trying to commniate with ur neighbirs?? In other words, which is cause and which is effect, is an intersting question.
I think we do self-isolate and for many reasons- peace, privacy, safety and recouperation from the stress of being ‘out there’-
Maybe life was sweeter, more peaceful before TV and computers, but we adapt don’t we?
I think it is a combination of many things. What I have observed though is the difference between rural and urban also. While living on Kauai for eight years, a large part of the appeal was the sense of community. People do talk to each other in the grocery store. Tellers ask about your family while conducting a transaction. Communities come together to help in times of need, whether it be a natural disaster or losing a loved one to a car accident. Only three murders occurred in the eight years I was there. People took care of each other. I had a marvelous group of friends, not just islanders but tourists that come back year after year because of the Aloha spirit and the friendliness of the island and it’s “locals”.
It doesn’t matter what the “community” is that people join, whether it be an online community, a church, an AA group, a political alliance, we all are looking for a sense of fellowship and kindred spirits. Isn’t it up to each of us to try and take what we learn here back out into the community face to face?
The rural/urban distinction is something that exists even in Italy and seems to be one of the many negative byprodcuts of unrestrained modernization/globalization. I live in a relatively small village in which the doors are left open (quite literally) and everyone knows everyone else to some extent. The crime rate is practically nil, their really isn’t any deep poverty, the mentally ill are taken care of by their families instead of institutionalized and so on. Twenty minutes from here is Naples: recently there has been a tremendous breakdown in the social structure and the city has been overrun by teenage gangs of thugs (all Italian, so race does not eneter into this at all) and other forms of chaos which in turn are related to high unemployment, extaordinirly low sense of sel-esteem and a failing educational system which has been increasinly imitating the US model of lowering standards.
It’s a comlex problem.
One more thing and I will shut up, I promise…lol! Alot of folks, including me had stopped speaking out in public out of fear and what was termed politically correct. Or the attitude of well, I am living in a very red or conservative area and it is just better to not say anything because I have to live here. I understand that to a certain extent. I manage a community and the last thing I can do is express openly to my tenents my political beliefs. There is a fine line. We just have to know where to draw it don’t you think?
I agree with much of what everyone has already said and to it I would just add one thing and tell it by way of a story:
Last night I was over on dKos and I saw a diary by Barbara who is in a small town in LA called Bogalusa. She is from California and has been there for three days. Long story short (read the diary for details), she is going to FedEx me rolls of film of the horrors she has seen there and I am going to digitize and post them for her further diaries….this kind of action would not be possible without blogs.
It’s odd that someone gave you a “3” for that comment.
I thouhg I was hallucinting for a moment there or something.
Well, whatever….
I’m absolutely l00% totally positive it was a slip of the finger. It almost always is at this site. Now and then I get a three and I just look at who gave it to me and smile, knowing his/her finger slipped and they’d be mortified to know it. I hope I’m forgiven for my own finger slips, too!
The 3 in this case was an accident, I am sure of that….sometimes we slip, when rating a whole line of comments and hit the 3,….
I know Aloha would never give Brin. a 3 or anyone else for that matter,
just wanted to pop in and say that in case AL doesn’t see this comment.
Just for the record, it was an accidental 3 and I have rerated to a 4 but it deserves a 10. Sorry about that. I have caught myself doing that on several occasions which I try to promptly remedy. The 3 is useless imho.
Which is why I sent not one red cent to the Red Cross.
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
I have a friend locally who was in a hurricane, bad, in the south when in college. She says do NOT rely on the Red Cross. Do NOT send donations to them, do NOT expect them to help.
She says, find a local person you trust, and send money/things directly to them to distribute.
quote from comment at dkos–uhuh – thanks brinnainne for being there.:)
I too read this diary at dkos this morning. I immediatley wrote my Senators and some of the media. I also am going to write the local rag North County Times, where I did get an LTE published last week. Barbara is from a town just north of where I live. Hopefully, if the NCT publishes one “local’s” story it may start the ball rolling. Thanks Cat for all that you do. You are a prime example that blogging and action work hand in hand!
Lee, Hi :o)
Your comment here explains how I feel about the usefullness of blogging. Above in the thread you say you were inspired by others here to go to Crawford, as was I. My experience there led to this:
http://www.travelerwatchman.com/newsstories.asp?id=1491
which led to this:
Ending the horror
Southold
To the Editor:
Usually I find the words to sound off, but after reading your article on Michael Long on his trip to Crawford to stand with a mother who lost a child, I just want to silently hold him and those wonderful people who journeyed to Bush’s back yard. That Bush peddles while his country burns is surreal!
Mr. Long echoes the sadness and resolution that more than 60% of us express and who do not believe this is a noble cause. Sixty percent and more of us believe that the evidence is overwhelming. We have been lied to and that close to 1,800 kids have died in this “noble” cause and that over 13,000 have suffered wounds and have lost limbs and will come home to cut veterans’ benefits, not to mention a hell of a life. While Karl Rove looks under every rock to discredit Cindy Sheehan, sending his bile on to Limbaugh and other talking chicken hawks, those of us who believe this horror must come to an end will continue to be heard.
But, to all those who still believe this war is indeed a “noble” cause, who have plastered their cars with magnets supporting the troops, I believe they are sincere in their beliefs. There is something they can do right now that will go a long way to really supporting the troops. First, stop shopping. Second, wire Rummy and tell him to get off his duff and get the badly needed body armor rushed to the troops. Third, talk to your kids. Ask them to take time away from their college frolic and go down to the recruiting office and show their commitment.
There are less than 135,000 troops on the ground being picked off like cherries. They must have support troops. If the kids of the privileged will not sign up, then God help us, we may indeed need a national draft. Then all our kids and grandkids go to war and if Bush’s war is so “noble” as the hawks insist, then it is worth fighting with all their children too. If it is not worth their blood, then we should bring all the troops home now.
Dorothy Wolf
which then led to me being invited to speak at an anti war/faces of the fallen gathering.
So what began with me being inspired by Tracy, like you, to go to Crawford, through her posts and comments on a blog, has caused Cindy Sheehan’s story to be spread into my local area to people in the real world who otherwise might never have known about her. So to me, blogging is a way to organize activism and to spread the word that the MSM refuses to spread.
Now that I think about it, my comment here might seem a bit narcissistic. Ya think? :o)
I think it’s great to see how participating here has made so many of us aware of what’s going on in the world and get up and go do something, anything, to try and change it. BooMan’s “Looking Back” diary was making me think of how I wasn’t all that politically aware (I did know NOT to vote for Republicans) until election 2000, where I fell asleep with the tv on, knowing that Al Gore was our next president, and woke up at 2 am to an unbelievable nightmare.
Now I pay attention to local politics and drag my kids to anti-war rallies…and talk about these things to my friends and neighbors. I’ve turned alot of people on to things like Alternet (got to start somewhere!) and the great writing on this blog.
I don’t know if it will make a difference in the long run, but at least I’m doing something. And I get ideas and inspiration for what else I can do from the people in this blog/community. Y’all are my virtual water cooler…
And I guess for me, that’s the point.
I so love hearing stories like yours my friend. Another inspiration to geoff my duff and keep fighting no matter what. I continue to find my voice a little bit at a time. Please Maichael keep up the great work! We are all in this together now aren’t we?
Reminds me how I had a conversation with my maintenance man shortly before the election and talked him into voting Kerry. He is Mexican but became a citizen several years ago. He was a fence sitter at the time. He came to work on election day with his little “I voted” sticker on and told me how good it felt to vote and thanked me for telling him more about W and why he should vote for Kerry. Just think if each of us can change just one person’s mind huh?
I’m a reader and commenter, not a diarist.
I never blogged until I heard Howard Dean speak. He, a real live person, inspired me to look up DFA, which led me to Meet-Ups, which introduced me to at least one real new friend, and which also eventually took me to Iowa to work on caucus weekend. I was there for The Scream That Wasn’t. It prodded me to anti-war protests, it reached into my pocketbook and took out lots of money to support Dean’s candidacy and then inspired me to give a little to other candidates. It also took me to DailyKos, and then to Atrios, and finally to here, the first place that has felt like a blog home to me.
Why did/do I blog? Well, it’s still fun for me, for one thing. If that stops, I’ll stop. I’m not jaded abut it yet. I’m not tired of it. I like it and the only times I step away are when general blog anger builds over something and eventually I get tired of that and just want some peace for awhile. I admit to being a news junkie and where else can I go to get up to the minute news and gossip that doesn’t come as fast or furious in any other place as it does on blogs? Of course it’s not always reliable, but what other source is, and anyway that’s what my own brain is for, to weigh things and decide for myself.
As to community, I suspect those of us who frequent places like Cheers & Jeers (I don’t) or Froggy Bottom Cafe (I do) experience blogs as community a bit more, because that’s what we’re actively trying to establish in such places. A LOT of people who met on-line here are going to be meeting f2f on the 24th and they’ve done a lot of their planning in the Cafe. And we all watched as BooTribbers like Adastra, Supersoling, Brinn, MilitaryTracy, Janet Strange, and others (I hate to leave out names!!)became a real life community, helping each other get to Camp Casey and then, in several cases, continue to help each other’s work with evacuees.
I live alone, so I love coming down to email and the BooTrib in the morning. But I also have lots of f2f friends, so it all seems balanced to me. Now and then blogs can still take my breath away by giving me behind-the scenes news that I would NEVER suspect from reading/watching only the MM. Can’t live without that now!
I do my best to contribute with news and information about Italian and EU politics. I also post occasional philosophically-oriented diaries which somtimes generated a great deal of interest and soemtimes just get comletely ignored.
But sometimes I feel like I’m just whistling in the wilderness. Ohter times, I wonder why anyone should listen to me in any case since their are billions of people writing something the same or similar.
But the general impression I’m getting is that most people here anyway think that blogs can be useful, and have been useful, in poltical and educational terms for many people. The latter is what I’m most interested in.
Regular diary writers are probably much more likely to feel what you describe. If I were writing diaries and getting ignored I’d probably start wondering why I was doing it, too. The rest of us are greedy, I guess. We want you to keep feeding us great stuff even if only one or two or none of us comment on some diaries. I wish you could know how many people read without saying anything.
Well, another thing for me specifically is that I often stop writing on blogs or forums for several weeks or more becuase of health probelms and then I feel that everyone has forgotten who the heck I am and I have to start all over again to build up new relations or restablish old ones.
But enough of my self-indulgent whining. The diary should be about why others particpate in this sort of activity. So I will try to just read from now on.
With your user name, gilgamesh, and your unique topics and writing style you are never forgotten when you are ‘away’ from blogland. And you always come back with some new and interesting idea(s) to get us all thinking … like this diary!
PS. You provide great quotes/sig lines too. One of the last you used was,
Every man’s death diminishes me
For I am involved in mankind…
That is one of my favourites.
I thank you and I’m sure John Donne would thank you if he were alive.
doesn’t necessarily mean a lack of readership. I always read your diaries but I don’t comment because the subject matter is generally one that calls for a level of knowledge that I lack. There are very few writers who are as intellectually challenging as you are; so I very much hope you keep going — my brain can always use the exercise.
Thank’s for the kind words, AndiF. I appreciate it.
For my part, I have made some very good and faithful friends, and even if that does not translate to political action en masse, it is still very valuable to me.
I don’t blog but I do participate and it’s quite important to me because I live in an area where the people, for the most part, don’t share my views or my background. And I’m a telecommuter so most of the time I don’t have much contact with other people (and when I do it’s because I’m at a customer site). Blogs keep me from feeling isolated and silent, both politically and socially. At blogs where I participate regularly I get to know and, yes, care about not only the blogger but the people who comment regularly.
And we shouldn’t doubt that these relationships are quite real. There were a couple of examples of how strong they are recently: At one site, a commenter mentioned that she wasn’t going to be able to go to her sister’s wedding in New Zealand. The blogger had put up a post about this, indicating the amount of money needed, and offering her paypal account as a way to donate. The money for the ticket was raised in 24 hours. At another site, a professor brought to people’s attention that a grad student whose blog she, and many other read, had a young husband who was dying of cancer and that they couldn’t afford hospice care. Again within a couple of days enough money was raised to pay for the hospice care.
And finally there’s the sheer pleasure of reading an intellectual exploration of ideas, an angry rant, a intense emotional description of a personal event, an expression of beauty.
Good questions.
I don’t know.
I quit.
Seriously though…
I don’t actually believe I could accomplish something. I know I’ve accomplished something. Vanity? Narcissicism? Attention-mongering? Self-indulgence? No. That’s not why I blog. Afaic, if I can help one person by blogging; if I can comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable, that’s good enough for me.
I’ve said quite often that I honestly don’t know why people like what I write or how I write it and that’s not what’s important to me. What’s importnat is the exchange of ideas that give people hope. It’s like therapy en masse and, these days, we need it.
I agree that everyone needs to step back and examine why they do anything in life if they want to define their priorities. I did that re blogging recently and I’m comfortable with why I do it.
I also agree with others who have mentioned the need for community. I’m disabled. I rarely get out. My social circle is very small. My neighbourhood is typical in that most people stay to themselves. I live with 2 cats. I need community. It keeps me sane. The internet has been my connection to the world for many, many years now and being able to reach out and get immediate feedback has been invaluable and life-affirming.
I think the answers are very simple and I have no clue why it would take 900+ comments over at dKos or any blog to even have this discussion. We need each other. That’s it.
Catnip, you’ve sort of directly addressed me here, so let me just quickly respond:
[quote]
I don’t actually believe I could accomplish something. I know I’ve accomplished something. Vanity? Narcissicism? Attention-mongering? Self-indulgence? No. That’s not why I blog. Afaic, if I can help one person by blogging; if I can comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable, that’s good enough for [/quote]
I said at the end of the diary that it was just a personal, subjective sensation about the whole phenoemon of blogging that I have felt lately. Sometimes I feel that way about EVERYTHING, so please don’t take it personally or as an insult to indivual bloggers. Of course, it’s obviously an over-generaliztion, but this is more alonf the lines of a rant (in the sense of getting somehting off my chest) and not a serious, careful analysis of why people blog.
I was just trying to provoke interting responses. This has obviously succeeded in your case, among others.
I am also diabled, FWIW, and that is one of the main reasons I continue to blog, in spite of my frustrations and doubts and depressions.
I envy you for feeling that you have made a difference though. I am self-doubter and can’t help doubting even my own doubts.
I didn’t take it personally. I took it as an opportunity to look at why I blog.
I envy you for feeling that you have made a difference though. I am self-doubter and can’t help doubting even my own doubts.
I understand that. I’m not as confident as I may appear. I just know that if I’ve written something and someone says “thank you”, then I know I’ve made a difference. I focus on the small things. Those of us who examine our lives so thoroughly sometimes need to step back and get humble enough to realize that we do have a place in this world and that other people are telling us that. The doubter fights that but sometimes just needs to let go.
I learned something very important and simple as a child: when someone compliments you, just say “thank you” – no matter how your insides churn with doubt. The more you do that, the more you learn to believe those compliments in a very humble way. There’s a big difference between humility and doubt. Humility forces us to accept our doubts and step beyond them.
I realize that their is a difference bewteen self-doubt and humility. But you are not equating self-doubt with arrogance?? I also learned as a child to say “thank you” to people who compliment me and I also practice it sincerely. But I may frequently doubt, not the sincerity of the person who compliments me, but the fact that I deserved to be complimented, for example.
I see your point about doubt getting in the way of acting and so forth (the Hamlet sydrome) but I don’t think doubt is equal to arrogance.
I’d have to think about that a bit more but my first reaction is that doubt is not the equal of arrogance at all. On the grand continuum of human experience, doubt would (sometimes) fall quite near low self-esteem. Arrogance can be seen as the expression of low self-esteem and insecurity, but it can also be seen as an expression of ego, so it can’t be said to always mirror the experience of doubt. There’s a fine line there. Doubt, in a positive sense, is a letting go of ego. Without doubt, we’d never have advanced as a civilzation because doubt provides the opportunity to forge ahead with new ideas. Doubt, in the negative sense – based on low self-esteem, sits much more closely to humility, however, humility is a raw acceptance of things as they are. Humility is the abscence of ego, while doubt based on low self-esteem points to ego and a person’s discomfort as a measure of ego.
Does that make sense?
Yes, it does actually. But I really have to get off now, for heaven’s sake!!
As a professional, I consider myself a “youthworker/socialworker/family therapist” and usually interpret what I see going on with young people as an indicator of what is wrong with our culture. So, rather than seeing young people as uniquely AD/HD, eating disordered, oppositional/defiant diordered, etc, I see those as descriptions of our culture in general.
Lately a lot of young people are being diagnosed as “attachement disordered” which I think is the ultimate diagnosis of our culture.
Blogs might not be the most healthy reaction to that (I just don’t know yet), but they are certainly a powerful tool for many people to combat the isolation!
Though not a professional psychologist, I did touch on this particular aspect in one of my comments. I think I asked someone if we were not isolating ourselves behind the CRT and other technologies and if this were not a cause (or at least an aggravating factor) in this cultural “attachment disorder” or an effect of it.
I think you’ve about summed up my own ambivalence with regard to the efficacy of the treament or therapy of blogging. No one really has definitive answers.
First, because a blog is a powerful tool for learning and sharing information.
That alone would be enough reason to read and write on blogs. Hell, hypertext would be enough reason.
Second, blogs are a new way push a story.
Some of those stories have fizzled. Some, like Trent Lott or Valerie Plame, have not. But with Salon and the Note actually covering bloggers…and the NYT and WaPo dropping references to bloggers right and left…internet citizen journalism is not at all shouting in the wind.
Third, blogs are incredible ways to build online community.
Either a large blog, like this one, or a small one, like mine, builds ways for writers and readers to come together and collapses so many barriers to communication. I’ve always responded to comments to what I write for this reason. How many other ways can you read an essay, respond, and then have the author of that essay reply?
Fourth, online community, while limited in terms of the face to face contact possible, is a powerful tool when used in a focused way.
The Herseth race was one example. But I think of what the Helms / Gant race in North Carolina might have been if we’d had blogs. Or what DSA might have been in a blog context. And that’s just talking politics, and not culturally, or even personally for some people. You can live in a small town, as a “liberal” and feel not at all alone.
Fifth, for some writers, and I would include myself among them, blogging improves their writing.
My first diaries on dKos do not resemble what I write today. The tools were there, and the skills, but it was only with constant feedback and learning that I honed my online voice and learned to write better pieces. In some ways, setting out to do my own thing is an attempt to step it up one notch further. We’ll have to see if I find my legs.
All of us with off line experience can see that the internecine squabbling and ego tripping of the blogs, the circular firing squad and preaching to the converted does create real obstacles to blogs being the savior of politics as we know it.
But, that being said…go sit in a local political meeting some time. The comments are almost always hit and miss…and the ability of LOUD TALKING pompous folks to dominate is ever present. And off line writing, in small papers and journals is usually no better, and oftentimes worse than blog writing.
Gilgamesh, you seem dubious of ego as a motive for writing. All writers have egos. If they didn’t they wouldn’t write. It comes with the territory.
If you write well on the blogs. And I’ve written a couple things that have gotten attention and readership…you DO, in my experience, have some effect in the offline world. An editorial cartoon uses your idea, a political campaign uses your theme…you get an email saying how important your piece was to someone, that you had an impact.
That inherent meritocracy is a powerful thing. It creates a profound democratization of discourse, that, I can tell you, was not present in the late 80’s when I was coming up.
Blogs may not the be all end all, but writing, reading, discussion and debate IS the essence of democracy. In that sense, all I can say, is more power to ’em.
I certainly agree that a blog can be a very powerful tool for learning and sharing information. So is a radio. The question is how is the powerful tool used. In the US, talk-radio was used (back when I was there five years ago) by right-wing radicals like Rush Lamebaugh to disseminate devastating dosages of disinformation or, at the very least, slanted information. My beef is not with the medium itself, but what I percieve to be its increasing usage for motives far different than learning and sharing information.
Perhaps the problem here is that the blog world has not yet matured to a sufficient level of dvelopement so that is beomes capable of self-regulation and examination of the factual accuracy of claims. In any case, the existence of close to 30,000 blogs and websites devoted to conpiracy theories about Princess Diana indicates that there is something not quite right which goes bcak to the question of signal to noise ratio.
Second, how much of blogging is genuine Internet citizen journalism as opposed to just repeating things with cut-and-paste techniques from other blogs which got them from other blogs which got them from the Saturday Morning Sun in San Fernando Valley?? There’s no editor, no standards, no professor, no peer-review of knowelgable experts. How much is just scandal-mongering and conspiracy-theorizing, instead??
.00001 genuine citizen jourmalism perhaps??
The third and fourth points both have to do with online community. I really think this is the the most diffciult point ot try to address. First af all, I agree with you about community and the unique interactive nature of reading and writing on blogs. It is quite fascinating. . But I must play devil’s advocate or the discussion will lose all interest.
I will only say, is this community building at the expense of other, and more important forms of community building?? Is hiding behind our CRTs, as I put it before, the cause of disruption in our communities, the effect, a solution, or just a distraction??
It’s getting rather late over here (amlmost 9:00) so I can’t address the rest right now.
A nicely laid out set of responses thouhg!!
Oh no, I just can’t let this one pass by without rebuttal though.
Meritocracy in the blogosphere?? Is that a joke?? Do you know what the most popular blog in the US is (or was anyway) as of svereal weeks ago?? It was the sexual confessions of some teenage dingbat who had sex with various men and then resprted the details on her blog. I didn’t realize that the success of pornography could be explained in terns of meritocracy.
Who was one of the leading political bloggers out there for the last several years?? Matt Drudge??
Matt Drudge says extraordimaiyl outragoues and silly things…and is very successful and popular as a result. He’s no John Rawls!! Meritocray?? What??!!
referring to me.
No one much knows who I am, I don’t hype, or at least not that much. (lowercase titles, offbeat titles, not always popular subjects…etc.)…I used to write on dKos, but was only on the front page for…a matter of two months…
and yet I’ve written things and heard folks use my exact phrase on TV the next day…or written about something (a musical group, a writer, etc.) and had a response from the subject themself.
If you write well, and build community, there is a mertitocracy on the web that is more powerful than writing for a small journal in your hometown and leaving it in coffee shops.
The scrum of diaries, and recommendeds…is powerful. As is the amplification effect of linking and blogs taking up a certain topic.
Gilgamesh, I think thou dost protest too much and are WAY too negative…why focus on Diana and porn? This whole thing smacks of the naysayer.
There is some good to the blogs….ie. we’re having a conversation on one right now….hell, I could end up telling my grandkids that I once rapped with gilgamesh.
No, actually I was just trying to offer some thoughtful objections to your comments as a general statement about meritocracy in blogging and some of the other very powerful pro-blogging considerations that you have offered.
Am I a nay-sayer about blogging?? Sometimes I really am and other times I feel that it’s an absotuley extaordinary technology that I find invaluable to political disussion and always lively and various in content. I felt that there were some fascsinting contribution and exhanges right here in this thread for example. And that, in itself, had a kind of benefical therapeutic effect on me last night.
In short, I have very mixed feelings about it.
But what I really enjoy is the cut and thrust of debate
and discussion about issues and ideas and I think what really disturbs me about the blosophere is the echo-chamber sensation that often prevails. But these are my considerations and I appreciate your contribution and I’m pleased that you offered you view on your own blogging experience.
I also wanted to agree with you that “egoism” is “part of the territory.” I once visited the Vatican library andand the first throught that struck me was “Man, human beings really do still think that they, as individuals, have to write continue to write books about something which almost certainly has already been written about fifteen billions times.” Egoism is a part of all writing and great deal of the best writing is the most egoistic, I dare go so far as to say.
I have humans for community, and I have a mirror and sound recording for ego. Working with my hands at my own startup craft business, I haven’t a fraction of the time to divert whatever talent I might have to writing for its own sake. For the same reason I can’t spare the time for physical political activism except on rare occasions.
The access to fact-checked information is irreplaceable for me. It supports me an average of once a week or more contacting various media outlets to pressure them on factuality or viewpoint. I couldn’t do this more than a few times a year without the blogs’ information resources. I also wouldn’t have the hope that enough other people were applying pressure that my efforts would contribute to anything positive.
Because I’m the smartest person in the world, and it provides me with an excellent conduit that I can use to dispense my knowledge and wisdom to all you plebeians.
The fact that you didn’t know that is evidence of my assertion, and my post here is an example of my methods at work.
🙂
HA!
This reminds me very much of the type of arguments used to defend intelligent design creationism. I can’t prove it false, therefore it must be true.
Comradery, shared knowledge/communication with other like-thinking individuals and to learn things not covered by the corparate media. And then there’s the glamor of posting. 😉 (world fame and all that)
Consider the alternative, in which most us were engaged before coming to blogs: nothing.
Maryscott,
sorry to do this here, but I tried to register to your site last night, got a password, but can’t sign in. It just keeps kicking me back to the sign in box and I can’t re-register with the same name because it’s already taken, by me! :o)
Any suggestions?
is happening to me at MLW.
The “Why not?” defense is still the most convincing that I have come across so far.
Also, I would add, there are much worse things a person could do with their time: starting unnecessary wars, making enormous amounts of profit by exploiting people through religious manipulation and fraud, mass ethnic slaughter, fill-in-the-blank name-your-horror here.
I blog out of pure vanity. Plus it is fun and informative. And I get to talk to cool people. What’s not to like?
Of course you do. So do I, at least in part. I don’t think I write out of pure vanity. I think I am sometimes genuinely motivated by the desire to share something I have learned in the course of my educational (formal and informal) woth others. But, of course, it can be objected that I do it becuase I egoistically get enjoyment out of sharing information woth others and not for others sake. Well, at the very least, I do it for free while others are often entirely motivated by material profit.
I do it because if only one person reads it, maybe something will make that one person think, and in the current situation, such a seemingly small thing has the potential to save lives.
Even if only one life, to its owner and those who love him, it is an important one.
We’re a wonderful experiment and we must endure–but dagnbabbit–we will overcome. We The People. If we don’t, we are fucked. Period.
I blog for the same reason I keep going to work every morning. I do both for all the women whose lives are being ground down and whose futures are being ground away with every day and every repressive anti-woman law that passes.
For them, and for all the other women I will never meet. For the ones who don’t know what is being done to them, for the ones who do know and feel powerless to change it, and even for the ones who know but think it’s OK because it doesn’t apply to them . . . until it does.
Does it do any good? Does it make any difference? Is Bush back on the bottle? Who knows? But just when I start thinking it’s nothing but sheer self-delusion to continue, something always happens.
I make a connection with someone else who cares as much as I do, their own passion jump starts me for one more diary, and our new friendship makes both of us stronger for what happens tomorrow.
Or I see information from one of my pieces turn up in a place I’ve never been before, and realize that even if I don’t always know it, the word is moving.
Or sometimes it’s a more direct and personal validation, such as the day a few months ago when our Democratic county chair — whom I know because she’s a strong feminist attorney who donates much of her valuable time to representing judicial bypass applicants pro bono — called me at the clinic and asked for my email address. I’d gotten no further than m-o-i-v when she screamed, “moiv?? Oh my God, you’re moiv?”
So for all those reasons, for as long as anybody’s reading, I’m moiv.
i blog, therefore i am…
to celebrate the mass miracle of the internet, i blog.
because when it all comes down, we’re all bloggers, even if some don’t know it yet..
i blog because life in rural italy can be very lonely sometimes.
i blog because i have discovered that the elixir of snark, liberally and bounteously applied, can induce the kind of gutwrenching laughter that is the only remedy for my often nihilistic despair at the human condition.
i blog because it reminds me how many people there are who have done a whole bunch of homework i’ve been unaware of, and a sharing takes place.
i blog because i believe in self-education, and good blogs are a wonderful way to pass the time allowed us here to sharpen our wits.
blogging our way there….