At his new digs, Conor Friedersdorf has a good partially anecdotal post up about those who have been in the know about the ongoings in Iran and those who have not. Conor notes that of the two groups of people with whom he had occasion to spend time over the weekend as events broke in Iran, it was the blogging-set who were up to snuff on what is undeniably a world event of importance and those folks who tended to rely on more traditional means of information consumption had barely a clue of the stirrings in a geo-political hot spot.
Conor is certainly not alone in noting and, in some cases, chastising cable news for its utter lack of action in covering Iran’s political upheval. Here at the League, E.D. voiced his own surprise and exasperation at the lack of information flowing through the mediums by which a ubiquitous number of people continue to garner information about the world outside of their lives. I’m not about to go to bat for the mainstream media here, but there is a cautionary note in Conor’s piece about blogospheric know-it-alls that I think bears further scrutiny.
Namely, we wayfarers of the blogopsheric highways and byways need in some, perhaps many, cases to temper our pride around being “in the know”.
I don’t throw that note out flippantly. I remain a very devout fan of blogging and new media as a means of information gathering and analysis. It is undoubtedly true that the speed of that flow of information is one of blogging and new media’s biggest strengths. But as is so often the case, I think that our biggest strength can also turn out to be one of our biggest weaknesses if we fail to maintain a critical analysis of what we do and how we do it.
Events like those that are currently occurring in Iran are, almost without exception, extraordinarily complicated affairs. Making our grappling with what is in fact going on and developing some kind of analysis out of that grappling even more difficult is that information about those kinds of events tends to be pretty piecemeal and sporadic, regardless of whether CNN is on location or not. So it is not uncommon for bloggers and new media titans to adopt a “work with what you’ve got” attitude around their synthesis of the information available.
Such an attitude is fine as far as it goes and I certainly don’t condemn folks like Andrew Sullivan or Chris Dierkes here at the League for pouring through the information they are able to gather and trying to piece together a coherent analysis not unlike the process of piecing together a puzzle. But really and truly understanding in any kind of significant way what is happening in an event like that in Iran continues, I believe, to require a degree of reflection that is just not amenable to the kind of rapid fire jigsaw analysis and bite sized Twitter updates that have increasingly become the hallmark of our “cutting edge” new media analysis. Not only does it take a kind of time that bloggers rarely grant themselves, but it also requires a pool of information that isnt readily available within the kinds of timelines we generally work.
As a part-time, unpaid, independent blogger, I have found myself increasingly aware of those limitations and how much I have and often time willfully ignore those limitations. Personal events in my life aside, even if my schedule were wide open, I just have no confidence that I could possibly have the ability to write anything that truly cuts to the core of what is happening in Iran right this moment. As I more consistently apply the rule that I should just write something because I can write it, but ought to aim towards writing something that cuts above par for the course and finds a means of adding value to the over all discussion, I find that my ability to offer rapid fire response any and all breaking issues diminishes surprisingly rapidly if I’m being honest with my application of that rule.
Certainly those bloggers who write on a full-time basis and are compensated for that time are in a better position to do so, but even still, I think the limitations of the medium we’ve chosen — and I should note that I take the factors of those limitations to be largely self chosen as well and not intrinsic to the medium — continue to apply. So, as Andrew Sullivan comment in his Atlantic piece on blogging, the conclusions we come to in this medium in the way that we currently work within it tend to be largely contingent.
My concern is that in the heat of the moment we tend to forget that reality. Which in and of itself, isn’t such a terrible thing. But my further concern is that in forgetting that reality, we have a corresponding tendency to take what information is available and run it through the parameters of our analysis that hew to the lines of our own contexts for understanding. Instead of dropping our preconceptions about what things on the ground are like in Iran, we subconsciously pretend that the factors that determine our own understanding of our lives apply to what is happening in a country that is literally across the planet from us.
Or, put another way, I fear we essentially analyze events in Iran based upon our own biases without ever giving ourselves the time or cultivating the inclination to attempt the intellectual and emotional exercise of transcending those biases to get even a glimpse of how things look from a perspective that is radically different (though not wholly foreign or alien) to our own. As a result, I feel like we often see these types of events not for what they are or what they might be, but rather for what we want them to be, which, needless to say, I take to be at least partly unhelpful.
None of which is to say that I think bloggers should give up or stop writing in the fashion that they do on events that break and are of importance to our understanding of the world. Don’t get me wrong, I greatly value the work that many, many bloggers do on a daily basis, many of them of their own free time and initiative. But my take home message here is to chasten the blogopshere to remember that our machinations are as much exploratory as they are conclusive and that we aren’t shut off from offering conclusive analysis, but that to do so we need to allow ourselves the time and the space to offer valuable conclusive analysis that is as deep as it is wide.
Burt Likko 
Will Truman 
Teacher 
Mary 
James K 
Jaybird 
Borat: “I do a picture, only small, of the Tishnik Masacre. Where many Uzbeks…crushed!”
Kindly Gray Hippie: “How did you feel when you drew this?”
Borat: “Very proud!”.
KGH: “I’m just listening with sadness…a little sadness for your people…?”
Borat: “Yes…no, it is not sad. It is us who do the kill!”
When in doubt,
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I’m with you–I’ve made a conscious decision to not pay that much attention to Iran news until the whole thing shakes out a little more. Figuring out when you can know something useful about a situation is a major challenge.
I don’t know, if i was in the streets of iran, I’d be checking the blogosphere to see how outsiders are viewing it. I would be discouraged if all I read — let’s be cautious. If I was risking my life to fight against totalitarianism – http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NTM2ZDdmMWFiYWY5MWJiMTkwN2JhZGMwOWU2ODAzZDk= – I would appreciate some moral support even if it’s not from a place of total understanding. I think they need to know some of us are hoping that freedom is possible, and that it’s a good fight. It’s not about our understanding of the world — right — it’s about their struggle.
Mike, I think I was pretty clear in this piece that I wasn’t suggesting that people should stop writing about events in Iran out of a sense of caution. What I did suggest is that people be cautious about claiming to have a conclusive understanding what is going on Iran at this early and scattered a date. I also think it is important that we don’t just go about putting the puzzle together as the pieces become available, but that at some point we sit back, look at the puzzle we’ve put together, and consider whether it accurately reflects what we were trying to discern with all of the pieces out and some time under our belts to consider what has happened, how, and why.
The two processes aren’t mutually exclusive, but blogging seems to place a premium on the former, often times, it feels like, at the expense of the latter. And that is what I’m throwing up a cautionary note about.
Hope that clarifies.
Dan, also, I appreciate the sentiment, but I’m not sure that the take home message from what I wrote is “don’t pay attention to any news from Iran for the time being”. Rather, I would suggest that you endeavour to pay as much attention as you can, while bearing in mind that a thorough understanding of what is occurring is unlikely to emerge in the immediate future.
Scott,
Despite Hamlet — Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not ‘seems.’
I feel ya.
Frankly, 99% of what has been posted on Iran, here and elsewhere, is almost useless. I think the problem with bloggers generally is that they’re inevitably somewhat narcissistic, and seem to think that the world wants to hear their opinions on anything that happens, despite a lack of expertise. And then blogging is just an inherently limited medium. If I wasn’t very bored at work, I doubt I would read any of this stuff
And providing bored people with something to do isn’t a worthwhile endeavor? Beyond food, shelter, and making babies that’s been the main thrust of human progress since forever….
“Frankly, 99% of what has been posted on Iran, here and elsewhere, is almost useless. ”
We’re all striving to be a 1 percenter.
I’m constantly having debates with people about the value of blogs (or lack thereof); Sullivan makes probably the strongest case for it, but I think he’s basically only correct on blogging insofar as it’s journalistic or diaristic. For actual intellectual discussion, philosophical / political / theological or otherwise, the actual debate and actual discourse happens in academia and the various venues involved there. The fact that some academics happen to also blog rarely affects this (Hilzoy rarely posts on philosophy, e.g.). Economists tend to write pretty serious stuff in blogs, though … anyway, it’s my constant nagging suspicion that the internet provides a simulacrum (and not just in Baudrillard et al.’s sense) of actual discourse
Fair enough. I just think it’s fun and good practice, quite frankly. I’m not really in it for any serious depth. That’s why I read books. And hey, if people enjoy blogging or reading blogs and maybe get some new ideas or just kill some time, then I say bravo…
Oh, I only meant the “value of blogs” in the sense of actual intellectual debate — they have all sorts of other values. It’s an extremely interesting medium
Having spoken to humans in real life, I am constantly amazed at the quality of “actual intellectual debate” on blogs.
For example: It exists here.
Dude, in real life? One is far, far more likely to have a ten minute argument about Freddy Mercury (mustache? Or no mustache?) than about The Constitution.
Damn skippy, Jaybird. I hate to say it but I really rarely have this sort of debate in real life.
And no mustache, definitely.
Mustache 100%.
The Middle East has a saying about particularly formidable men: “An eagle could land on his mustache!” Truly, an eagle could have landed on Freddy Mercury’s.
Worse than that, remember when Amadinejad said that Iran doesn’t have homosexuals like the US does? I never read his statement as saying “we don’t have gays” but “We make Freddy Mercurys. You people make Liberace and the cowboy from The Village People.”
It was twice the insult we thought it was. Three times.
For actual intellectual discussion, philosophical / political / theological or otherwise, the actual debate and actual discourse happens in academia and the various venues involved there.
Could it be you’re, Paul H., not comparing like with like? Compare above average blogs to above average academic venues and I think you’d see similar characteristics. Also, I’m tempted to put the brakes on holding academia in this much esteem. Calvin says, “with a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog” as he hands Hobbes his book report, “the Dynamics of interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: a Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender Modes”. Not far off the mark, Crooked Timber has an excellent post (and comments) on some of the less than penetrable practices, Verbing the adjectivised abstraction, their examples:
paul, I think that broadly speaking you have a good point about blogging lacking a certain depth of intellectual rigor. But I take that shortcoming to be cultural in nature and not structural and the responsibility for changing it to fall to bloggers themselves who care.
I think that is certainly part of what we try to do on this site, undoubtedly to mixed success. But I guess I would suggest that at least we’re trying and generally with an openess to our limitations.
Creon Critic; you’re talking about a small percentage of ‘continental’ work in the humanities, which doesn’t simply = academia.
Mr. Payne; I don’t think it’s simply cultural, but has everything to do with the format. As I mentioned, Sullivan basically has it right; blogging is an ideal diaristic/journalistic first draft of events/history, not so much a venue for lengthy reasoned debate. Sure, LOG is attempting to do something more, but frankly I’m not sure that meandering debates between generally intelligent scruffy 20-something grad student-esque people is going to give me something more informative than, e.g., going to a lecture by Alasdair Macintyre and talking to him and two of my professors afterwards, and then reading a couple books/articles on the topic covered by the lecture, written by people who are experts in their field. Though this is, again, not to say that blogging doesn’t have all kinds of other values (bringing up new ideas, entertainment, etc.).
I just talked to Alasdair Macintyre and he said that he was going to be out of pocket all summer.
The League, however, is going to be here 24/7.
If you want to get hip deep, nay, neck deep into a topic… well, yeah. You go to a lecture and then you read the book the lecturer tells you to read.
If, however, Alasdair Macintyre ain’t around, you got here. And, as I said, Alasdair Macintyre ain’t gonna be around.
On that note, I’d also say that for those of us way, way outside the beltway, this sort of forum is simply a nice way to join – in whatever small way – the larger political and cultural conversation.
Also: who in the hell are you calling scruffy?
I can be very scruffy at times. But right now I’m clean cut and well-shaved. As my two-year old keeps remarking: “Daddy get a haircut. And showered? And shaved?” Apparently these things are novel to her. I maintain that while I am not the most consistent shaver and that my hair is often too long, I shower on a very regular basis….
I merely stand aghast at those who come into a crowded bar where a corner has a group of people discussing religion, politics, current events, pop culture, art, history, politics, and Freddy Mercury and pointing out that a bar is no such place to *REALLY* discuss such things and, on top of that, calls those seated “scruffy”.
That’s not merely a poke in the eye, it’s a meta-poke in the eye.
If only they’d come up with a way to serve beer from a blog I’d be in heaven. Great analogy by the way. That’s exactly the right way to think about a blog…
Indeed, a good point. I certainly have criticisms of blogging and think that it could stand to incorporate a greater degree of intellectual rigor, but that doesn’t lead me to conclude that it can’t incorporate such rigor.
And as much as I appreciate academia (and this isn’t a back handed compliment, I really do appreciate and value academia), I am sometimes struck by the intuition that the criticisms that flow out of academia towards other mediums and forums of intellectual advancement are as much about maintaining academia’s perceived possession of the terrain for such advancement, as they are about valid criticisms (of which there are many).
My own observations around blogging and its potential future are in no small part an attempt to articulate a means of doing away with the notion that “real intellectual discussion” can only take place within a certain environment or set of institutional parameters. It occurs me that society as a whole would benefit from a greater openness and willingness to incorporate intellectual discussion into the sphere of the everyday life. Said proposition doesn’t suggest that any discussion in everyday therefore can be considered intellectual, there remain certain criteria by which I think we ought to judge intellectual discussion and I would be hard pressed to do away with those criteria for the sake of accessibility.
Of course, claiming that “real intellectual discussion” only even happens within the walls of academia is, to some extent, a self-serving and reifying proposition that ensures that this remains the case. I find it somewhat analogous to the discussion about “real conservatives”, which is to say that I find it pretty unhelpful on the whole.
paul, your characterization of people you know nothing about aside, the format of blogging is, if anything, incredibly flexible. That the medium has, to date, been utilized in the fashion you describe says nothing about how it might be used in the future.
It is certainly true that reading a blog and attending a lecture are two very different things, but that doesn’t mean that both can’t in principle strive towards the same kind of intellectual rigor and that the contributors can’t, by definition, be experts in the field of their inquiry. Just because someone’s inquiry into a particular field doesn’t occur in a lecture hall or a classroom doesn’t mean they aren’t attempting to apply a similar type of thoroughness and quality of thought to the ideas there within presented.
But, I suspect you have made your mind up on this point as it seems to undergird pretty much any and every comment you leave. So I shant expect much of a willingness towards exploration as a result of my propositions.
Thanks for the comments anyhow.
you’re talking about a small percentage of ‘continental’ work in the humanities, which doesn’t simply = academia.
Point taken. But I’d suggest “publish or perish” is pretty well observed across a variety of disciplines. I recall a seasoned, tenured professor remarking on a particularly abstruse bit of a theory, “That’s because this author wants tenure.”
Also: who in the hell are you calling scruffy?
Exactly. Apparently, I’m sextagonal(?) and have a monocle. And I have precisely no comment at all on this wholly defamatory PhD comic.
Guys, I am equally scruffy; I’m not knocking scruffy people.
I’m obviously not saying that blogs cannot ever have intellectual rigor, or cannot ever contribute to philosophical discussion — the medium is limited, but it isn’t that limited — the point is that the truly brilliant people with expertise and knowledge and credentials tend to write articles and books, not blog posts. The people having online debates are no doubt well-meaning, but blogging (at least 99% of blogging) is, as you mentioned, like a really loud conversation at a bar. An intelligent conversation, at times, and maybe there are good ideas, but really what’s the difference between reading the usual big-name bloggers (at TAS, the Atlantic, etc.) and sitting across from them at some bar in Adams Morgan? Do the real intellectual movers and shakers in a field sit at a bar and say snarky (albeit intelligent) things to each other? No; they’re going to conferences, writing books, writing articles, and teaching. Perhaps someday the level of discourse in blogging generally will be raised, and people over the age of 35 (or whatever) will start blogging; and that will be a great day. But it hasn’t happened yet.
Fair enough, Paul. I guess the question becomes: if you and everyone else agrees that the forum being discussed is a bar, then why complain that the bar isn’t a lecture hall? Why not just figure that it’s a bar and enjoy it for what it is? I only say this because in all fairness, whenever the subject of quality etc. comes up you generally let it be known that you’d rather be somewhere else, you have no patience for us, etc. And yet you keep coming back….
So I’m just confused.
“Do the real intellectual movers and shakers in a field sit at a bar and say snarky (albeit intelligent) things to each other?”
I don’t know which movers/shakers you hang out with but the ones I did needed two glasses of wine and three cigarettes before they felt ready to get started.
The stuff that they say “on the record” in the conference hall is all well and good, of course… but the stuff that they say when they’ve got a couple in them would seriously make you look at the on the record stuff in a whole new light.
Right – I think we’re mixing up process with product. A lot of bloggers end up writing important books and many of them are also speakers, teachers, etc. But a lot of good ideas germinate in bars and on blogs. I think of the Inklings, for instance. Not all the good ideas that came out of Tolkien, Lewis, et al came whilst listening to one another lecture. Those boys liked to smoke their pipes and drink their drinks and converse. And that’s kind of like a blog – a conversation (process) not a paper (product).
“But it hasn’t happened yet.”
Precisely, wanna see if we can contribute to making it happen?
lol, well, I actually do post plenty of constructive comments (more than I critique things); perhaps those comments just get lost in the aether, or whatever. Part of the problem is that I came here just as a fan of Freddie (who I’m mostly no longer a fan of, alas); the Politics of Scrabble, etc., blogs never interested me too much, for whatever reason. Anyway the primary difficulty seems to be that there’s JUST enough interesting stuff to make me want to leave LOOG in my RSS feed. I “keep coming back” because I have a great interest in various topics discussed here (and elsewhere on blog-related sites), but I guess I just keep hoping that the level of discourse will be higher (this is not meant in an insulting way).
Basically, if I can be slightly autobiographical; I’m working as an editor at a DC-area think tank, while working on my dissertation, and I seem to keep on fondly hoping that my downtime at work can be taken up with something better than blogs, like that someone somewhere is writing about philosophy/theology/etc. at a truly academic-quality level, yet this doesn’t seem to happen. I keep looking for the DeLong and Mankiw of philosophy/theology, essentially. Perhaps I’ll just read academic articles from databases, instead.
But I think I’ll take the hint and just stop posting here; best of luck to you all.
Paul – no hint intended. Just honest curiosity. You don’t comment a lot, and often as not you comment to say that you’re bored or uninterested. So that seems somewhat discordant with the fact that you also are apparently a regular reader. A while back I wrote a short piece on I Claudius and Obama and you said “more like this” which I was glad to hear, but I still have no idea to this day why that piece resonated with you and others don’t. Truly, I like the criticism but I just don’t understand it fully.
Oh, this is totally a baseline thing.
Out here in the sticks, we have to do stuff like “remember when we did stuff like talk about philosophy/theology and whatnot all the time” because, at work, the folks talk about stuff like “baseball” or “the new Transformers movie” and about how “golly, that’s a real big word you just used”. For them like us, we go to blogs and find respite from a Hobbesnian world.
For folks like you, it’s a step down from the Lockean one.
Well, I suppose I can at least respond to that.
In just the last couple weeks I wrote a long comment on an abortion article that Will (I think?) posted, and then on something else that I now forget; the only other time I can think of, offhand, that I posted something critical would be in the post where you guys ASKED for criticism.
Maybe the problem with the internet really is anonymity. I’m at least not posting “anonymously,” but it becomes way too abstract; I read something that strikes me as tedious, and I write “this seems tedious” (one of Reihan’s recent posts, for example, where he did his usual pretentious rapping/bad fiction/name-dropping Pitchfork bands/babbling on about his friends), where that should probably just be kept to myself, right? Maybe all commenting on blogs should be abolished? Or certainly on YouTube videos, at the very least? Douthat (well, his old blog) and Sullivan have the right idea, maybe. Real conversation should happen through email, not blog comments?
Where I wrote “more like this”, on that post, I guess I just felt like I really WANTED there to be more posts like that (namely, short and concise, yet still informative and interesting). It’s very hard to write a good long-form blog post; often (though not always), such posts — whether coming from Greenwald, or someone at LOOG — tend to include too much meandering and throat-clearing and expansiveness, in my opinion. So the idea is to provide constructive criticism.
But then, if only I care (if only I’m finding something to criticize), then why should I say anything? Shouldn’t I just stop reading? Why share my opinion? And I honestly don’t know. Which is why I should probably stop.
Then again, I actually kind of enjoy when someone calls me “smug” and “hipsterish” in a comment, since it forces me to ask myself whether, in fact, I’m being “smug” and “hipsterish.”
…and that’s true even if I am not, in fact, a “twenty-something.”
Don’t stop commenting, Paul. I just think that people like a little substance with their criticism or praise. I mean, when the criticism is “99% of this is boring” etc. then there’s really little left to work with. I agree that long blog-posts can be a lot of meandering, throat-clearing, etc. For sure. One of my theories lately is that a good blog requires good “pacing” – a healthy mix of post-lengths, topics, etc. That’s my goal. And it always helps to get slapped upside the head when your stuff is not up to par. But usually it helps more if you say why also…
Thanks for commenting…
Well, to be fair, I said that 99% of the stuff posted on Iran generally was “almost useless” — I’d say that LOOG is boring less than half the time, which is reasonably impressive.
(Also my new theory is that I’m really just annoyed with myself for procrastinating on the dissertation — which I really could be doing at work, if I put my mind to it — and so I occasionally write annoyed comments in blogs? Maybe!)
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