When it comes to blogging, Andrew Sullivan is an old hand. And an indisputable expert. In the (redesigned) November Atlantic he has written a 5,000 word “dead-tree” essay, Why I Blog.
In it, he tells of those early days grappling with what to write for an audience of only a few hundred back in the spring of 2000. He recalls how he was “technologically clueless” and used Blogger for its simplicity. Right off he found directly broadcasting his own words to readers “exhilarating literary liberation.”
He makes a compelling case that blogging “heralds a golden era for journalism.” For Andrew (readers of his blog call him Andrew, print readers Mr. Sullivan) that gold is found through the interaction between writer and reader that blogging makes possible.
The blogger is, he says, “a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production.”
Some bloggers collect other bloggers’ posts. Some are more eclectic, or aggregate links in a particular niche, or cater to a settled and knowledgeable reader base. All make music:
Each week, after a few hundred posts, I also write an actual newspaper column. It invariably turns out to be more considered, balanced, and evenhanded than the blog. But the blog will always inform and enrich the column, and often serve as a kind of free-form, free-associative research. And an essay like this will spawn discussion best handled on a blog. The conversation, in other words, is the point, and the different idioms used by the conversationalists all contribute something of value to it. And so, if the defenders of the old media once viscerally regarded blogging as some kind of threat, they are starting to see it more as a portal, and a spur.
There is, after all, something simply irreplaceable about reading a piece of writing at length on paper, in a chair or on a couch or in bed. To use an obvious analogy, jazz entered our civilization much later than composed, formal music. But it hasn’t replaced it; and no jazz musician would ever claim that it could. Jazz merely demands a different way of playing and listening, just as blogging requires a different mode of writing and reading. Jazz and blogging are intimate, improvisational, and individual—but also inherently collective. And the audience talks over both.
The reason they talk while listening, and comment or link while reading, is that they understand that this is a kind of music that needs to be engaged rather than merely absorbed. To listen to jazz as one would listen to an aria is to miss the point. Reading at a monitor, at a desk, or on an iPhone provokes a querulous, impatient, distracted attitude, a demand for instant, usable information, that is simply not conducive to opening a novel or a favorite magazine on the couch.
At The Daily Dish, Andrew quotes a reader’s take on blogging and history, and stresses that “the essay is a defense and celebration of blogging – but not as a replacement for long-form writing or in-depth journalism. In fact, I think blogging makes the long, deep take more important.”
He urges us all to get the magazine for just $24.50 a year. I was a subscriber for decades. It’s time I renew!