It’s that time of year again: Time to promise that we’ll do better in the next 12 months than we did in the prior 12. I won’t bother you with my personal or familial resolutions for ’09, but I do want to share a few blogging-related resolutions.
In the past year, I’ve increasingly found it necessary to withdraw elements of, or entirely delete, certain posts — usually because I have either rushed to judgment or proffered a woefully unsubstantiated opinion.
Of course, such failures are, for many blog readers, part of the allure of a medium that helps feed their insatiable hunger for quick, uncensored, gut-level reactions to the day’s news. The problem with those morsels is that they too-often lack nutritional value; they rarely advance constructive dialogue.
Accordingly, in 2009, I resolve:
- To regularly disappoint anyone and everyone looking for a rapid, thumbs-up or thumbs-down take on breaking stories. This pledge does not mean I won’t post on breaking news, only that when I do, I’ll share information as it’s reported, reserving judgment until I’m able to construct a balanced and informed opinion.
To better practice the civility I’ve often preached. Net: When I disagree with someone in the new year, I’ll strive to more precisely and consistently focus my criticism on the pro’s and con’s of that person’s actions or ideas, avoiding presumptive comments on his or her character.
To devote more time to questions and doubts than I do to answers and convictions. This may seem the oddest, most-frustrating resolution of all, but I’m increasingly convinced answers and convictions are in far-too-plentiful supply in our society — in fact, they’re available in such abundance, they often crowd out reasonable attempts to sidestep the baby-and-bath-water conundrum.
In the context of that last resolution, I recently shared my doubts about the various arguments on both sides of the debate over the bailout of the U.S. auto industry. In response, a reader characterized the post as “plain vanilla with no (vanilla) beans” and recommended I “lead, follow or get out of the way.”
I respectfully disagree, not with this reader’s characterization of the post or with the plain language of his recommendation, but with his apparent assumption that productive debates require every participant to either take a firm stand or disengage. Quite to the contrary, I think many debates would benefit profoundly if more participants used more asterisks than platitudes.