[From the diaries by susanhu.]

People who write online in a sustained way…as many of us here, including myself, have done…are engaged in a project that dates back a ways.

You could say that our work represents the latest flourish of the “small press” movement that presaged the Enlightment in Europe.  I have no doubt in my mind that if Denis Diderot, Voltaire and Mary Wollstonecraft were alive today, they would be bloggers.  In so many ways, they already were.

You could also take our work further back to the free speech democratic traditions that anticipated what we call the ‘invention of democracy’ in Athens 2500 years ago.  What is scoop, after all, other than a Socratic dialogue?….(If there is one figure who might stand in for the spirit of the blogs, our real blog father, wouldn’t it be Socrates?)…What is blogging more than conversation in writing…like those of the Vedic and Talmudic Scholars…or the work of the Chinese writers Lao Tzu or Confucius and their historical collaborators?
We’ve seen, in the last weeks, some bad news for our corner of the blogs.

Soj is folding “Flogging the Simian” after having her identity probed by a nosy colleague…Arthur Silber folded “the Light of Reason” because he could not make more than $200 a month on it and received so little appreciation from the “A-list” blogs…Marisacat was banned from dailykos…which for those of you weren’t there in the early days would be like Booman announcing, one year from now, that he had banned Susanhu…for a single comment that, in my opinion, might have been handled in a much different way. (From what I’ve read on LSF…and there could be more to the story, I don’t know…she was pushed out on the basis of a comment inquiring about someone’s offline identity, ie. something that is not cool…but with…as I’ve noted before is the case at dailykos…little due process or public accountability for the decision.)

Blogging, like all open source, democratic forms of speech is prone to burn out and flame out.  Like the poison hemlock that his fellow citizens forced down Socrates throat…there are those who would poison our discourse, poison the well, and poison the spirit of free speech.

We need to understand that about this medium.  And, if we are to make online writing a sustained source of information and opinion in our public discourse, we will have to evolve traditions that help us make sure that while:

  • yes, burnout and bitterness happen
  • yes, some people will want to maintain anonymity and they should be respected
  • yes, some people will come and go, including voices we value and love

the conversation we are having should not end.  It is part of the life blood of the longstanding project of democracy itself….as messy and inconsequential as it is the MAJORITY of the time.

Am I happy with the factionalization of the blogs?  Not in the least, though I understand it.  Factionalization can be a sign of intellectual freedom.  It can also be a sign of clubbishness and close-mindedness that locks sides of the debate into petty and closed-loop discourse.

That  happened with the left in New York in the 30s and 40s and 50s, with Parisian intellectual life in the 80s and Italian politics for the better part of this century.  Good things can come of this state of affairs, these bitter inter-nicene battles…Dante’s work, for one, would not have existed without it…or, in the present day, the work of Michel Foucault, Susan Sontag and Edward Said.

But if we are to flourish in the midst of these conflicts and sustain this experiment in online democracy we need to understand the ground we stand on and have the maturity to seek balance.

I’ve been open about my real name,  Paul Delehanty, and identity, I’m a photographer, in part, because, as a small businessman, I know that the vulnerabilty and openess of having my information out there for the world comes with both a price…and with benefits.  

Others may not feel the same way about that trade off.  Since secrecy and a private life seems to drive so many bloggers, we need to be able to navigate that situation.  You see, the privacy that so many online writers crave is also the source of so much of the bad behaviour others exhibit.  It’s easier to “throw bombs” when you are wearing a mask.

Further, I think we need to understand that writers like Arthur Silber….major voices who worked diligently to provide content for their readers…need to be nurtured in this medium in some way.

We need our Billmon’s and our Digby’s…and our Soj’s and Marisacat’s.  We also need our “big wigs” and our “A listers” (what a heinous term…please, friends, don’t use it to refer to yourself!)…to show more appreciation of the collective efforts of the many….both readers and fellow bloggers.

Simply put:  I know, speaking as ‘kid oakland,’ that my work would dry up in a vacuum.  I need readers and fellow writers to do what I do.  No blogger should pretend that this isn’t true That any of us, somehow, sits above the scrum.  We don’t.  None of us does.  That is the beauty of the blogs.  Those are its Socratic roots.  The readers are the most important part of blogging.  We forget this at our peril.  It is the first rule of online writing.

Bloggers need to understand that we are all participants in public intellectual life.  Whether in newspapers or magazines or in books, that intellectual life is a part of our shared human history.  It’s not going away.  We need to build sustainability and mutual respect into our dialogues.

The marches yesterday taught us that, on some level, there really is no difference between us….Bootribbers or Kossacks or LSF’ers or MyLeftWingers and on and on…other than our T-shirts.

Collegiality and respect should be part of our mode of operation.  We should take this to heart.  There are reasons we have separate blogs.  There is no reason we should not have open debate and discourse between them.  I’ve tried to do this, and will continue to do so.

In my view, here, on BooMan Tribune, we should strive to continue to innovate ways to make tolerance and sustaining voices a signature part of the culture here. This a fresh place, founded, like the United States of America, on the principle that dissent and free speech and tolerance make us STRONGER not weaker….that living with differences and criticism is a virtue, is, indeed, a rallying cry.

At the end of the day, Socrates, a public figure, the source of so much of our philosophical heritage….including the right to ask questions, was poisoned by his fellow Athenians.  They voted to kill him and watched him die.

None of us here is Socrates…but all of us know the flavor of the poison that brought him low.  We’ve seen it in action on the blogs.  Democracy and free speech have a price.  For none of us, however, in the 21st Century, should that price be more than the need to “take a break” or “moments of frustration with our peers.”

Bitterness and dead-ends get us nowhere..and we should not needlessly lose voices that we cannot afford to lose.

One of the best things the blogs could learn would be something that every five-year-old knows.  All of us, at different times, needs a time out. That being said, mob-rule and the self-righteous majority, or even the lone spiteful blogger, can often be merely the bearers of hemlock, poisoning our debates.

All of us who would be participants in this public discourse…should look on blogging, or whatever version free speech takes down the road…as something we’ll do into a ripe old age.  And while some of us, like Lao Tzu himself, will hand off our testament to a border guard and ride off into a quiet retirement…others will walk down to the Athenian agora one more time to debate in the midst of the crowds.

I know that’s my plan.

You see, had Lao Tzu lived today….he might have had taken a laptop to his rural retreat and just, you know…

come up with a new user name.

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