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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