Comment Envy

I didn't start this blog thinking it would be the greatest blog ever or that it would revolutionize the InterTubes. I wasn't expecting a flood of comments on each and every post. Nonetheless, you can't help but be a bit envious of this kind of comment production: Roger Ebert's recent post on his blog about Ben Stein's "documentary" (yes, it seems the the scare quotes are necessary) has generated, to date, 824 comments.

Eight hundred and fourteen people were interested enough to say something about his snarky, silly, fun post. The post is very provocative, which surely helps generate more comments. I've tried to be provocative from time to time, often to no avail. But, then, I don't have a Pulitzer Prize, a dozen books to my name, international fame as a critic, or (formerly) my own TV show. Some academics have garnered a good deal of attention for their blogs, such as Michael Bérubé, but the interest seems to be mostly within academic circles.

The "blog" phenomenon is only about a decade old, and it continues to mature. It is interesting that newspapers have started imitating blogs by allowing comments on their online editions. Now, instead of a handful of letters to the editor about a story, often published days or weeks later, you have immediate feedback on the story. Of course, not all of it is worth reading so there is a trade-off between thoughtful, edited, vetted letters and immediate shoot-from-the-hip comments. For example, a recent op-ed by Bill Ayers in the Gray Old Lady generated 618 comments but only five letters to the editor were published.

Inside Higher Ed, a new, exclusively online, news source about higher education has allowed comments on its news stories from the very start. It was founded by some former Chronicle of Higher Education editors. The Chronicle created some blogs, which generally generate few comments, but still does not allow comments on stories, instead relying on pithy letters-to-the-editor, like this one.

The jury is still out, I think, on whether we've achieved something even remotely approaching a Utopian form of democratic communication. Is this free-for-all comment-fest the "public sphere" the influential German philosopher-sociologist Jürgen Habermas envisioned in his 1962 book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere? Or are we, in the words of Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, still "bowling alone," connected by electronically but not in any "real" way?

OK, I realize that's a heavy way to end this post. But I got stuff to—I've got some blogs to go comment on.