As we begin thinking about the intersection of culture and technology, Ronni Barrett has another contribution for us to consider. I rely on blogs (and the ancillary feeds and readers) not only to give you all a place to write, but also to keep you informed and to provide access to information that’s current. Fresh and up to the minute, as they say. But blogs seem to be subject to a bit of the “Rodney Dangerfield treatment.”
The NYRB Snarky Attack on Bloggers
When the latest issue of The New York Review of Books arrived in Crabby Old Lady’s snailmail box last week, she was surprised to see a big, bold headline on the cover – BLOGS - by Sarah Boxer. The NYRB is more likely to deconstruct Montaigne (again), discuss the death of Susan Sontag or ruminate on evil in postwar Europe (all in this issue) than report on anything as revolutionary as blogs.
I don’t read NYRB, even though I’m an author. I don’t read any of the main stream media publications on a regular basis any more. That’s a character flaw, probably. I’ve been known to look up and cite a journal article, but only to support historical perspectives. Nothing in print is up to date — except maybe the daily newspaper — and, while I’m sure there’s much of value in print that does not have a short shelf-life, it takes so much attention trying to stay current in my little corner of the universe, I don’t allocate time for resources that are a) expensive, or b) require extra steps to access unless somebody ELSE in my network points me to it first.
Where’s the common ground? How does this view of blogs and Ms Bennett’s response to it relate to education, technology, and communication?
January 28th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
The relation between the article and education, technology, and communication is with the perspective people take when they first hear the word blogs. Most people I have talked to don’t know exactly what it is and even if they have heard of it don’t know its capabilities. Some refuse to listen to any talk about blogs because they don’t understand them and don’t want to spend the time to learn about them. That’s the problem. We are not willing to take the time to learn about the things that are out there among our culture and use them to our advantage in an educational settings. Upon learning about blogs, I had ideas swarming in my head for my future classroom. They keep us connected with the rest of the world and grant us access to discussing topics with other people in the blogosphere.
January 28th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
It’s a very interesting thing that people (cultures?) tend to fear the things they don’t understand. The fact that Ms. Boxer felt the need to spend the first part of her article to explain what blogs are, is evidence of not understanding. Yes, blogs have been around for a long while, but many people still need the explanation. The latter part indicates the fear that blogs will somehow threaten writing as she knows it. I had no idea of the potential impact of blogs prior to last semester. Now, I see an efficient, valuable tool with many uses in many areas of life. They may get “no respect”, but their impact is felt.
January 28th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
I think that the last sentence says it all, ” It’s time for the print press to get over their provincialism and report on how blogs are changing the media landscape.”
Ms. Boxer I think is a little culture driven in her ways. She is used to the technical writing of scholarly work whereas the blogs are just random thoughts of ordinary people. I don’t think she understands the reason for blogging and how it helps connect ordinary people to other ordinary people so they can discuss ordinary stuff and maybe come up with something extraordinary. You can’t blame someone for getting mad because they put in the time and college to get to where they are when regular people now have as many readers as she does. I don’t know that for a fact, but I would assume that there are many blogs that are read by more people around the world than the New York Times is read. Blogging and our unprofessional ways are the ways of the future.
I look at blogs as a way of people that are in the trenches of what ever they do, talking about their day and getting ideas from each other on how to improve their lives. It is probably threatening to writers because bloggers are communicating on a different level (not a higher or lower level, just different), than the professional writers, thus they can’t compete with it.
January 28th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
“[T]he blogs are just random thoughts of ordinary people.”
Actually that’s the problem. Blogs are NOT just random thoughts of ordinary people.
Sure SOME are, but some are not. “As Time Goes By” is certainly not. I’d like to think that Phaedrus, and Cognitive Dissonance, and the Trader’s Diary are beyond “just random thoughts.” The blogs that you’re writing for this class are not *supposed* to be random thoughts.
We need to be careful here not to take a medium and pidgeonhole it into one thing. A blog is a piece of software first. What we DO with that software can be as homely or as elevated as the individual/s that contribute to it.
January 28th, 2008 at 11:14 pm
I am almost insulted by this notion that blogging is just ordinary and has not place in literary circles or circles of the intelligent and open minded. To me, blogs are so much more than common pieces of thought. Someone described it as an online journal, but it is so much more. An online journal is simplistic and mediocre. An online journal’s value is in the reader and writer. They are the ones putting the value into it, no one can say it is common or problematic. Look at the Diary of Anne Frank, would things be different if this simple diary by a 14 year girl been posted online for all the world to see. I have often wondered how she would feel to know that her intermost thoughts and desires were published for all to read. However my life would be so different had it not and whether I was the only who read it or not, it has value. Let the reader determine the value, not some elite writer who is simply scared and defensive.
January 29th, 2008 at 6:58 am
Like Lowell, I take issue with Barbara Nantz’s notion that blogs are “just random thoughts of ordinary people.” Some may be that, but many others are much more. And there is enormous value in how NYU professor Jay Rosen has correctly defined blogs - “little First Amendment machines.”
Blogs can be anything the writer wants them to be and in our current political climate, during which time blogs have proliferated, important issues crucial to the future of the United States are being discussed, examined, argued and minds are being changed.
A most important part of blogs are the comment sections like this one wherein discussion takes place. The best bloggers, on any topic, state their case, link to the reference material and the argument (in the best sense of the word) ensues often with widely differing viewpoints. Never in history has there been such an opportunity to engage with people you otherwise could never meet and who have information, opinions and reasons for them that you’ve not encountered before. In the parlance of the 1960s, blogs are mind-expanding.
And in the general area my blog covers - elderhood and what it’s really like to get old - blogs are a godsend. When, in retirement, people lose the daily camaraderie of the workplace, when family may live thousands of miles away, old friends die and in some cases, mobility becomes an issue, new friendships - as real and deep and caring as in-person relationships - are formed. Blogging keeps minds sharp and opens the world to elders who might otherwise be locked in loneliness and the provincialism of their community.
I think blogging - at least to the professional press which so often dismisses it as Ms. Boxer does - is at the same place pocket-sized calculators were in the 1960s. Remember when hands were being wrung over whether they should be allowed in the classroom? It seems archaic now. The time will come - soon, I suspect - when the value of blogs, both personally and to the culture and body politic at large, will be as indispensable as personal calculators.
And I’m wondering, too, what’s wrong with “random thoughts of ordinary people.” Ordinary compared to whom? As Lexie Centers points out, Anne Frank’s diary is the random thoughts of a 14-year-old and I suspect the time will come, if it hasn’t already, when a few blogs will emerge that have as strong an impact and as wide a distribution as Ms. Frank’s private thoughts.
January 29th, 2008 at 8:48 am
Random ordinary thoughts……..Where else do these thoughts find a voice? Ordinary people with ordinary thoughts need to be heard. Blogs provide, as we are seeing here, an important platform for engaging in the formulation of ideas. We have so much fed to us via the news media, basically telling us what we think and thereby influencing current values and trends. The average person, in the past, really had no outlet. The television and the news media is not real communication. It’s one-way and has certainly affected culture for many years. There’s an argument there as well……whether television and the popular media influences the culture or is a reflection of the culture. That’s been debated for years.
As a result of reading the initial post here and the ensuing comments, I find myself thinking about things that I hadn’t given much thought to previously. However, they are important thoughts. Such as, even though we’ve felt like we’ve come a long way from the very limited voice of the common person such as during the time period of the Reformation, we’re still seeing examples of how certain groups or individuals feel far superior in or protective (at least) of their position where they make judgments about the validity of others’ methods. Maybe that’s a harsh statement on my part. To say that Ms. Boxer does not believe that others should have their first amendment right. She probably would be offended at that implication. But from reading what she wrote, it does seem that she sees the open forum created by blogs to be far less valid than her mainstream publication.
January 29th, 2008 at 10:26 am
Here’s some extra thoughts on this subject.
It’s not about the value or “random ordinary voices.”
It’s about relegating all use of blogs to meaningless noise as if a) random ordinary voices have no meaning and b) all the voices in the blogosphere fall into the easily dismissed random ordinary voices.
It goes beyond the marginalization of “ordinary people” — as if that is anything other than another way of saying “people who don’t matter” — into the realm of generalizing people like Ronni Bennett, Joi Ito, Cory Doctorow, Shakespeare’s Sister and hundreds of others into the same category of blogger as the 15 year old in East Overshoe who’s world is ending because her best friend dissed her in study hall.
The problem here is that the 15 yr old’s voice matters as much as Joi Ito’s but for completely different reasons. In the first place the 15 yr old is not engaged in “journalism” but that doesn’t negate the value of her voice any more than novelists are any less important writers than newspaper reporters. It’s a matter of the application.
All writing isn’t journalism. All blogs aren’t Emo-pits. YOUR blogs are actually putting you all out there into the community of educators, sociologists, and philosophers who are engaged in serious consideration of the intersection of technology, education, and culture.
January 29th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
In Ms. Boxer’s New York Review of Books (NYRB) article, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21013, she writes the following:
With such riches to choose from, you might think it would be a snap to put a bunch of blogs into a book and call it an anthology. And you would be wrong. The trouble? Links—those bits of highlighted text that you click on to be transported to another blog or another Web site. (Links are the Web equivalent of footnotes, except that they take you directly to the source.) It’s not only that the links are hard to transpose into print. It’s that the whole culture of linking—composing on the fly, grabbing and posting whatever you like, making weird, unexplained connections and references— doesn’t sit happily in a book. Yes, I’m talking about bloggy writing itself.
I think that Ms. Boxer’s view of blogs here where she says—composing on the fly—may be true for some people, but I have never put something out there that I don’t really think about posting first. I believe the bloggy writing, as she puts it, is much more than she surmises it to be. As far as a book about blogs, I may be wrong, but I really don’t think that the people that read blogs are going to go buy a hard copy of a book anyway. I think she will always be able to go out and find notably bad blog posts and blogs, but I think the same can be assessed for print media like newspaper writings and books. Times are changing whether she—or anyone else is ready for it or not, and with this change comes the changing culture of accessing news and information via blogs. Those who choose/have chosen to communicate on the Web are changing cultures and bringing cultures together as well.
After reviewing Dr. Lowell’s post Old School—New School and Ronni Bennett’s The NYRB Snarky Attack on Bloggers I have concluded that blogs are a wave of the future (duh) to many, but for me, it is now a realization. With Dr. Lowell’s comments about blogs being up-to -the minute information I realized that every time I access the Internet that I am accessing information that even the newspapers haven’t printed yet. I will admit that reading blogs is new to me, so the new school is beginning for me.
Ms. Bennett’s response to Ms. Boxer’s article shows me that people do have a right to their own opinion, but that doesn’t mean that the opinion of one is not the consensus of all. Communication through means on the Internet allows others the opportunity to educate themselves and educate others. The common ground I think is the platform and I think that the Internet will always be dominant for some people, but for others, for people who sit and read the paper and watch the news, this platform will still exist as well.
January 29th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
I think that my favorite line was, “Boxer treats blogging both too superficially and too seriously.”
Certainly SOME blogs are mindless ramblings of a person’s thoughts, but some are well-written and thoughful. I think this is reflected in the print medial as well.
February 1st, 2008 at 12:10 pm
When I first read this, I saw a snippet of my old self. Not saying that blogging isn’t valuable, but the fact that being a Language Arts teacher, I am conditioned to a certain way of writing. Now the new self. Writing is a means of self expression. In my classroom, I value the ideas more than the mechanics of the writing. What does it mean to be a “real writer and journalists”? To me, a real writer is someone who is not afraid to express their thoughts and opinions regardless of what mainstream society believes. I, for one, have learned a great deal by reading blogs out on the internet. I am an educated person and I can make decisions on what is meaningful to read and what is not.
February 1st, 2008 at 11:35 pm
I didn’t know much about blogs before taking this class (I am still learning); but I see a blog as an instrument for writing, similar to the pad and paper. It gives the writer a medium for expressing thoughts and opinions. A blog entry can be used for serious writing as well as “mindless ramblings”. I have found the blogs that I have been reading in this class to be very informative. Perhaps the lady critiqueing blogs, is just a little afraid of what she may not fully understand. Sometimes we are too quick to criticize.
February 2nd, 2008 at 11:46 pm
I feel like Mrs. Boxer tried to pick out the worse part of blogs she could find. It was like she intentionally looked for the worse examples to site. She didn’t open her mind to the possibilities of a blog. How it lets anyone give voice to their opinions, inform others, or just blog about their day. As some have stated in their comments already, she doesn’t seem to think that bloggers have anything useful to offer the literary world. Blogs are new to me but I have found them informative and interesting.
February 3rd, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Some people are just not good at accepting change. How they were taught or raised was good enough for them and should be good enough for everyone else. I believe that Mrs. Boxer will one day see the value of blogs and change her tune, but right now it seems that she is going through the changing (grieving) process of the loss of printed media being the only way to publish. Right now, she is in the denial phase, and has sought out evidence that she feels supports her feelings. Eventually, she may reach the acceptance phase and move on, and maybe even join the wonderful world of blogging. I know that many of our classmates have been enriched by the information that has provided to us from reading blogs.
I have seen teachers (including myself) go through this same transition. Drill and practice was how they were taught math, and this is how they feel their students will learn best. But in our ever changing world, teachers are now having to adapt their teaching styles and incorporate technology, student-centered learning activities, including project based learning. We all adapt, assimilate, and change because we are dynamic beings. Mrs. Boxer’s view of blogs now is just a snapshot in time, we do not know what the future holds for her as far as how she views blogs, so hopefully she will see the commentary about her article and investigate further the value of blogs.