[lbo-talk] vaca reading

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Tue May 10 18:53:15 PDT 2011


At 01:34 PM 5/10/2011, SA wrote:
>On 5/10/2011 12:05 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>>It's the Internet. No one wants to read a book anymore. Everyone wants a
>>one- to three-sentence talking point.
>
>There's nothing new about that. The age-old definition of a grad student
>is someone who can argue about a book he or she hasn't read. And it's not
>just grad students. If academic scholars only knew what they read in
>actual books (as opposed to reviews, summaries, historiographical essays,
>etc.), they would know a lot less.
>
>I've always had a strong instinctive feeling that when someone responds to
>an argument by citing some book that supposedly proves the argument wrong,
>they have a discursive obligation to summarize the book. Otherwise it's
>the intellectual equivalent of having a girlfriend in Canada.
>
>SA

in spite of largely agreeing with you abotu academia, and in spite of agreeing with your last paragraph here, I did want to say that I think that the nature of blogging, because it follows a news cycle in a way that, say, email lists don't, is that there is a degree of difference here.

in other words, you and I, and others here, are products of academia, and we'd probably say that we belong to that pocket or two of folks who actually care about the book under discussion and getting it sorta kinda right. In other words, there were kindred spirits out there. You could find yourself and craft for yourself people, from all over the world, who _would_ have the same standards. (see recent piece in n+1 about bourdieu's journal, Actes....) You could carve out a niche for yourself. And you could invariably feel self-righteously justified about your superiority compared to the rest of the knaves.... (I'm having fun here, work with me.... it's not intended as insult, just self ironic observation....)

But this *never* happens on the web because blogging is slave tot he newscycle.

Email list, it happens. There will be people who will uphold standards in which people actually are expected to write about and quote from the book under debate. You won't be the only bozo doing it and others will pipe up and say that they appreciate the quotes, etc.

On the web with blogging, since all bloggers, especially the popular ones we all end up reading, have to be slave to the newscycle, constantly producing commentary on whatever the newest thing is, there's zero chance that the person can maintain popularity *and* actually read stuff. And that goes for the drive-by commentariat. Some of they may try. They might post mini dissertations on books in comments sections, but they can't keep up with the pace because, unless you post within a day or two of the cycle, everyone has moved on, and there's no point cause there's no one reading.

The very _structure_ of blogging, based as it is on competition among scare resources (time, attention, followers, readers, status, rankings, etc.) that *must* be scarce, *must* be limited means that no one can devote the time to actually reading material and commenting on it. The logical imperative of blogging mitigates against it. That's not the case in academia. The very structure of academia does not necessarily mitigate against actually reading and debating a text itself. You will find people who reward you for it and appreciate it, and follow same habits. You will *never* find that in blogging communities of authors and their commentariat.

Dave Winer's blogging software was once called Radio Userland (or something like that). Radio for a reason: broadcast by the blogging voice, everyone else listen. This was always why max's old blog, Max Speak, You listen, was hilarious! He actually had clue about what was up with that. This aint a conversation, this is my freakin' megaphone/radio: shaddup and listen. ha!


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