The bathos of the Blogosphere -- Providence Journal

Lee Drutman: The bathos of the Blogosphere
01:00 AM EDT on Tuesday, April 15, 2008
LEE DRUTMAN
WASHINGTON

http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_drutman15_04-15-08_7A9NFH4_v19.39d4902.html#

APPARENTLY, if you spend too much time at home churning out non-stop verbiage for the insatiable World Wide Web, you may die of it. So warns a recent New York Times article, which, upon the unexpected deaths of two middle-aged bloggers in one week, connects the dots and declares blogging a “digital-era sweatshop.” (“They work long hours, often to exhaustion,” the article begins. “Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts.”)

At long last, the dark underbelly of the Internet revealed! An army of pallid content-mules chained to their computers (no fresh air for them!), typing away furiously at all hours so that somebody, somewhere, will have yet another thing to read.

But, caricatures and health issues aside, there is something troubling about this increasingly non-stop go-go-go blogging world, this odd pressure to be able to throw up an immediate response to every new development, regardless of one’s understanding of the subject, and far in excess of what anyone wants to read (even if some of us feel compelled to try to read it all just to remain “in the know”). Such appears to be logic of the 24/7/365 global knowledge economy: If you don’t put up that quarter-baked bon mot right away, somebody else probably will. And then there go your unique page views, and with them the trickle of advertising that just barely pays the rent and puts ramen on the table.

Now, it is often said that this new world of blogging is good for democracy, because it broadens the conversation and lets more people participate. I don’t know. I’ve read the message boards on these blogs. It seems to me more like any angry shouting match than a conversation worthy of Deweyan deliberative democracy.

And as University of Chicago Law Prof. Cass Sunstein has noted, the Internet makes it that much easier to inhabit an insular intellectual environment in which one’s ideas are rarely seriously challenged, the sad result being that “deliberation” leads mostly to a kind of extremism in which the same basic talking points are over time masticated into an unshakable worldview. Here, the metaphor of never leaving one’s apartment is too good to resist.

Moreover, in the few years that blogging has exploded, a few particularly prolific bloggers seem to have emerged as the new Internet power elite, and the distribution of influence in the blogosphere can hardly be said to be democratic anymore, if it ever was. But these new gatekeepers have even more arbitrary qualifications than the old gatekeepers, who at least had to work their way up the proving grounds of the editorial ladder over decades.

But the biggest problem is that instant-comment pressures inherent in the Blogosphere sweatshop generate a reflexive (as opposed to thoughtful) political discourse. It’s not so hard to pull a few generic talking points off the shelf, throw in a few clever turns of phrase, and link to the latest Washington Post article on the war or the election, all in a matter of minutes. The problem is it’s the same talking points over and over again, and so round and round we go, from the bed to the computer and back to the bed again, never going for a contemplative walk in the fresh air, perhaps to come across new insights and observations.

In such a world, the perambulating scholar and essayist is out of luck. The day belongs to the caffeinated neophyte who has yet to be slowed down by the twin demons of doubt and nuance. Read one book on a subject, and you can become an authority. But read 10, and you’ve missed your chance.

Surely, the exigencies of the Internet economy are against me. Thoughtful restraint does not seem to generate Web traffic. And perhaps the wild rocket-paced world of blogging is simply endemic in our instant-gratification culture, on which an otherwise appropriate tilting at windmills allusion would be lost anyway.

After all, who has time to sit down to a lengthy essay in The New York Review of Books anymore? Or, heaven forbid, a whole book? What could possibly be worth thinking about for that long!? Besides, the two-sentence sound bite is so much easier to digest, with none of that uncomfortable nuance that comes with actual detail, and so much easier to move onto the next new new thing (even if it is just the old thing repackaged as something new).

But always being onto the new new thing sure is stressful, and for what? All this rush to make the same carping comments on the same never-ending political horse races, to point out the same obvious flaws in the latest New York Times story, and all before someone else does. Entertaining? Occasionally. Edifying? Rarely. Unhealthy? Yes, both for the body and the body politic.

Lee Drutman, a frequent contributor, is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California at Berkeley.