Earlier this month, Jyri wrote that 'in my case, the nature of academic writing has proven to be quite blog-averse'. He quotes William Gibson: 'if I’m still blogging, I’m definitely still on vacation'. Contrastingly, there's Cory, quoted, again, by Jyri: 'my blog frees me up from having to remember the minutae of my life, storing it for me in handy and contextual form'. Cory also says:
Blogging gave my knowledge-grazing direction and reward. Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mentalregisters.
(I blogged about Cory on the blog-as-memex, here.)
Now, Steven Johnson adds his voice:
… for me, at least 50% of the challenge -- and the fun -- of writing a book is dealing with the unique relationship that the author has to his or her reader. … The problem for an author is that books are not written the way they are read. They usually take years to write, from original proposal to final proofs; they are rarely composed in sequence; and by the time you submit a final manuscript, you've invariably read every page dozens of times, mostly out context. … for me at least, the trick of writing a book is somehow shedding all the layered, time-shifted contortions of writing, and somehow recreating what it would feel like to sit down as a newcomer to the book and start reading. Anyone who has ever written a book will probably recognize the challenge here: you write a new section at the end of a chapter, and as you're writing it, it seems like you're producing some great material. And then you sit down and read through the whole chapter a few weeks later, and the new section reads like it's been pasted in from someone else's book. Or you think you've constructed a perfect opening argument for the introduction, and then you sit down to read it and realize that you've neglected to mention the most important -- though also, to you, the most obvious -- point of all.
Most of the time, you can only catch these things if you've tricked your brain into approaching the book as though you yourself were a new reader, entering into that private, linear, slow exchange that is book reading. And private, linear, slow is exactly the opposite of the experience of blogging. What's great here is the remixing, the group mind, the hypertextuality, the fact-checks, the trial balloons. It's an amazing environment, but to me it's directly antagonistic to the mental state you need to make a book work as a reading experience, and not just a collection of facts and ideas. It's like trying to compose a new melody in your head while standing in the middle of a full-throated choral group. And so when I'm immersed in writing a book, I try to keep these worlds separate, even if it feels like I'm betraying the blog somewhat with my silence.
Blogging is a new thing and brings with it (new) tensions, (new) opportunities, (new) pitfalls. Blogging has taken me away from family, friends, offline reading, an idea for a book that I have … and so much besides. (See Scoble! — 'It's becoming more and more clear that something in my life has gotta give. I've got about 1,100 emails waiting. Maryam would like to have me say more than hello and goodbye to her. My son is now showing me how to play bass guitar via IM and that sounds fun. I haven't seen a movie in months. My friends are getting ignored. … ') I think Steven Johnson's right and if I'm ever to write that book I'll need to find some creative relationship between this blog and it.
I am reminded of that fragment from a Cathar sermon that Milosz liked to quote: 'If the world were not evil in itself, every choice would not involve the denial of some good'.
A very different concern about (but hardly peculiar to) blogging is: how many people will ever read this? There may be an answer to this that is peculiar to, if not blogging, then the net — and one that makes us re-cast the question. I was much struck just now to read on Kim Cameron's excellent and searching blog (dedicated to issues to do with Identity on the net) the following quotation from The Long Tail:
The Long Tail, on the other hand, is about nicheification. Rather than finding ways to create an even lower lowest common denominator, the Long Tail is about finding economically efficient ways to capitalize on the infinite diversity of taste and demand that has heretofore been overshadowed by mass markets. The millions who find themselves in the tail in some aspect of their life (and that includes all of us) are no poorer than those in the head. Indeed, they are often drawn down the tail by their refined taste, in pursuit of qualities that are not afforded by one-size-fits-all. And they are often willing to pay a premium for those goods and services that suit them better. The Long Tail is, indeed, the very opposite of commodification.
Kim Cameron comments:
Of course I like "longtail" thinking because it makes writing a blog like this one seem rational. When certain people ask me how many readers I expect to get with a subject like this, I can just say, "Hey man - I'm longtail. Get hip."
