NYRB on Blogging, Genre, and Professionalism

So there’s an article at New York Review of Books everyone here should read. Not that everyone should agree with it or draw the same conclusions as does the author, Sarah Boxer — I don’t, for example — but it’s a nice musing on the nature of blog writing and heck, it’s in the New York Review of Books.

I’ll snip some as an incentive to read the whole thing and then offer my (rather lengthy) response, below.

Volume 55, Number 2 · February 14, 2008

Blogs

By Sarah Boxer

— snip —

Are they [blogs] a new literary genre? Do they have their own conceits, forms, and rules? Do they have an essence?

Reading blogs, it’s pretty clear, is not like reading a newspaper article or a book. Blog readers jump around. They follow links. They move from blogs to news clips to videos on YouTube, and they do it more easily than you can turn a newspaper page. They are always getting carried away-somewhere. Bloggers thrive on fragmented attention and dole it out too-one-liners, samples of songs, summary news, and summary judgments. Sometimes they don’t even stop to punctuate. And if they can’t put quite the right inflection on a sentence, they’ll often use an OMG (Oh my god!) or an emoticon, e.g., a smiley face 🙂 or a wink 😉 or a frown 🙁 instead of words. (Tilt your head to the left to see the emoticons here.)

— snip —

Political blogs are among the trickiest to capture in a book because they tend to rely heavily on links and ephemeral information. But even blogs that have few or no links still show the imprint of the Web, its associative ethos, and its obsession with connection-the stink of the link. Blogs are porous to the world of texts and facts and opinions on line. (And this is probably as close as I can come to defining an essence of blog writing.) What is clear is that blogs are here to stay with no signs of their prevalence coming to an end any time soon. Although new bloggers would certainly benefit from checking out the best blog hosting sites before committing to a site to launch their blog with.

— snip —

Writing like this might seem easy, but just try it. Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at Stanford who writes for newspapers and radio and sometimes contributes to the blog Language Log, admitted on NPR back in 2004, “I don’t quite have the hang of the form.” And, he added, many journalists who get called upon by their editors to keep blogs are similarly stumped: “They fashion engaging ledes, they develop their arguments methodically, they give context and background, and tack helpful IDs onto the names they introduce.” Guess what? They read like journalists, not bloggers.

Bloggers are golden when they’re at the bottom of the heap, kicking up. Give them a salary, a book contract, or a press credential, though, and it just isn’t the same. (And this includes, for the most part, the blogs set up by magazines, companies, and newspapers.) Why? When you write for pay, you worry about lawsuits, sentence structure, and word choice. You worry about your boss, your publisher, your mother, and your superego looking over your shoulder. And that’s no way to blog.

— snip —

I like that Boxer has an easy-going appreciation for the writing style she describes, and I like that she is willing to consider the possibility that blogging represents a new genre of writing. But her focus on the profanity and crucially non-profressional status of blog-writing (if bloggers were paid, she insists, they would not write like bloggers) is both historically myopic and, as a matter of genre, missing the point.

Boxer makes no attempt to place blogging in historical context, or to compare its rise to the rise of other genres. But historical comparison is crucial. When Jane Austen was writing Sense and Sensibility the genre of “novel” was considered profane; not respectable. Both in subject matter and form the novel was considered either childish or prurient; the reading or writing of novels was not a passtime for the serious-minded. Authors wrote anonymously — Austen’s name appeared on none of her books in her lifetime.

Did the novel become less vulgar as it became more widespead? Yes, in one sense, it did become less vulgar — but not because it employed fewer swear words or engaged in fewer sex scenes. Rather, these things gradually became less vulgar as the influence of the genre spread. The novel was a challenge to accepted notions of vulgarity, propriety, and discretion in writing.

So, similarly, the nature of blogging is not a way of hiding from “professionalism.” It is an interrogation of the notion of professionalism as it obtains in the contemporary cultural climate, both political and otherwise. Even the way a blog looks seems to be changing to fit a sense of “professionalism” that would either imitate or be completely different from the standard format. Web hosting services like, HostiServer, give their users a landscape in which to create their websites and blogs in whatever way they choose to, for example, if a blogger wanted to make a blog that focused on politics, the format that they would choose would reflect this. If someone is interested in finding the different web hosting sites that are available out there for them, some can even read the reviews to find out which one fits their website or blog best.

To make this point in one way, a less significant way: political blogging is a challenge to the idea of “neutrality” in professional political writing — the constructed neutrality that is actually a defense of the status quo.

But to make the point in the more significant and deeper way, what blogging challenges is not just the value of an artifical neutrality but the value of an artificial professionalism. This distinction is crucial but would be an easy thing to miss. Newspaper columnists, for example, are not “neutral” in the received sense — columnists are not supposed to shield their biases from the reader — but columnists are beholden to a structured “professionalism” that is at once more insidious, more pervasive, and harder to challenge directly than is “neutrality.” And it’s oftentimes those columnists that bloggers take themselves to be challenging.

As a thought experiment, do you find it possible to imagine a political blog that is politically “neutral” but challenging because it is “unprofessional”? I say it is perfectly easy to imagine this. And that should suggest that “neutrality” is not central or crucial to what the establishment wants or needs to protect. What is non-negotiable is “professionalism” — and it’s exactly that which blogging does challenge.

Blogging fills a cultural hole that was there to be filled — a gap, a black hole in the logical space of cultural flow. That black hole gets called “unprofessional” by those who don’t want to see it filled. But the restrictions on language, subject matter, temperment and style — restictions labeled “professionalism” — are artefacts of an historical moment in the process of fading away.

This, by the way, is the real reason blogs attached to mainstream newspapers and magazines don’t work. It’s not because bloggers just can’t stand it not to be paid. It’s because if a mainstream organ tries to co-opt a genre that challenges its complacent assumptions (as with Nike co-opting the Beatles “Revolution”) that attempt instantly rings hollow. Bloggers can be paid, all right. Just not by you, Time Magazine. Successful bloggers are typically paid by advertisers directly; that is, paid for having readers, period — in whatever way those bloggers get them. This is a point Boxer seems to have missed.

If Boxer wants to call blogging a new genre — a view I agree with, partially, though blogging is a medium too, and which it more is might be hard to determine — then it makes little sense for her to suggest that blogs are weird or misfitty because they are not like examples from other genres.

Bloggers are blogging the future, and the future is blogging; just as the novel was, two hundred years ago. If the “anonymity” discomfits more professional writers, just wait. Socially constructed “professionalism” is the flip side of that “anonymity” . . . and in time both will be discarded.