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.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." So says the First Amendment of W.'s doormat, er, I mean the United States Constitution. We've recently had fun with the Second Amendment here in South Carolina. So, why not the First Amendment? What's next? Forced quartering of soldiers to see if we can find a way to mess with the Third Amendment too!
