Thursday, September 17, 2009

Is this blog shallow?

Wrote an experimental essay recently that included some content adapted from this blog. I used matching crayon colors for hyperlinks and shuffled the posts before putting them in an envelope for each reader. A lot of students were intrigued, but the professor didn't like it. According to him (this is a direct quote but "quote" marks make it looking like I'm mocking the statement, which I'm not-- believe me, I tried and then deleted them. Good riddance!):

The blog form is by default superficial (even when it pretends depth).

When I read that, I was struck by how perfect a marriage of author and form this blog constitutes. You see, like all blogs, I am shallow, even when I pretend depth. The blog form and I go together like wabadabbadoowaa and whatever else they sing about in Grease (or was it the Muppet Babies cartoon? My cultural memory is all out of whack).

There's only one troubling component to this. It's a mathematical fact that a negative times a negative equals a positive. Thus, if the blog form is shallow and I am shallow, this blog must be deep!

Did this blog accidentally turn deep while I wasn't looking? Or is it safely shallow, proving that my professor was wrong, and the form has a potential depth, corrected by my shallowness?

Should signs be put up to keep children from drowning? Shall I start selling stilts for my readers to get around the blog with?

Help me sort things out by commenting or voting on the poll to the right. I will defer to the wisdom of the masses on this one. (Yes, that means you.)

33 comments:

  1. That song was from Grease. But you have the words slightly off. If you ever need it sung properly, let me know; for some reason I memorized the entire song (with all of its nonsense words) when I was 12.

    I must admit, I voted for all of the options but the sucking up student. That's what you get for saying I could vote for multiple things!

    In all seriousness though, I do believe that the blog is like any other genre--a tool, something to be used for good or bad, the insightful or the mundane, the deep or the superficial. Just because I've read a superficial rhetorical analysis or two (or five per semester actually) that doesn't mean the act of rhetorically analyzing a text is flawed. It just means that not everyone knows how to do it in a productive way.

    I had one of the rhetoric professors ask me the other day, "Why do you spend your own money to pay for a website and hosting when you get no funding for it as a graduate student?" I told her it was because it would be read, and I could see from other websites out there that I could truly make a difference with it. The difference I have made so far is small--but a difference nonetheless.

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  2. I second Kathy's comments. And there is a cumulative value to less-than-deep blogging that can make it deep(er). Read one page of LOL Cats and you are laughing; two, you are rolling your eyes; 10, and you are spinning theories about pets, linguistics, niche audiences, and meme culture. Maybe, James, if you'd included some LOL cats pix in your experimental essay (at least a few dozen) your prof would have been jarred from the shallows by the shallow.

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  3. I voted, my friend. For the fact that the blog form is deep and you are shallow.

    It's the content and the form that determines shallowness (or depth, depending on how full your glass is), doesn't it? Am I being too simplistic? People are shallow on their blogs, yes; does that mean that blogs in general are shallow? That's a bit of a stretch.

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  4. Hmmm ...

    A few more blogs with "depth," physical, intellectual, emotional, or even religious.

    From the field of science,

    http://bosawais.blogspot.com/

    http://www.facebook.com/pages/Borehole-Research-Group/48876238958

    http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2004/04/22/in-the-beginning-was-the-borehole/

    From industry,

    http://www.heavyoilinfo.com/blog-posts/improvements-in-heavy-oil-well-testing/view

    http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2009/08/the-first-oil-well/

    http://oil-n-gas.blogspot.com/

    From humanitarian aid,

    http://thoughtsfrommalawi.blogspot.com/2009/08/sponsor-borehole.html

    And from medicine,

    http://berserkcell.blogspot.com/

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    The Nameless Nomadic Nanny

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  5. By the same logic as your professor uses, you could argue that short stories are short of substance.

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    The Nameless Nomadic Nanny

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  6. By the same logic, you could argue that Charles Dickens' serial novels are superficial because they came out one small piece at a time.

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    The Nameless Nomadic Nanny

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  7. By the same logic, you could argue that the "article and letters to the editor" format of technical journals such as IEEE's "Spectrum" magazine http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/ are superficial because they are essentially slow-motion dead-tree blogs.

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    The Nameless Nomadic Nanny

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  8. By the same logic diaries and journals are all relegated to the ignominy of shallowness.

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    The Nameless Nomadic Nanny

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  9. As are old-fashioned US Postal Service style letters and collections of letters.

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    The Nameless Nomadic Nanny

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  10. So, my question is _why_ unnamed professor thought that the blog form lacks depth. Because he might have a good point. Blog posts, according to convention, should be a length that makes for a quick read. For that reason, very few blog posts have really in-depth analysis, judging from the many blog posts I've read. But I wonder if you had presented your bits of blog writings in one document, if unnamed professor would have had the same complaints. Maybe the lack of organization seems lazy to him? Like you aren't doing enough work as an author to direct the reader through a cohesive, organized experience? Any of these points could be debated, of course, but I'm interested to know what his specific objections are.

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  11. Keep in mind that the World Wide Web was invented by a bunch of impatient physics folks (atom smasher types, if memory serves) who wanted to quickly share research results without growing mold while the waiting for paper journals to be published.

    My experience as an engineer has taught me that nothing is perfect, everything has good and bad to it.

    One obvious good of the WWW (blogs included) is that "writing to publishing" time is reduced to mere seconds.

    Another good is that the editorial process is bypassed, which removes the editors' biases, prejudices, and money-making concerns.

    One bad is that the editorial process is bypassed, which allows a lot of poorly written and poorly thought out (shallow!?) material to be published.

    The WWW (and by association the blogosphere) is more like a diamond mine than a jewelry store. At the jewelry store you don't need to do much work, but someone else decides what your choices are. At the diamond mine you'll need to do the searching and polishing on your own, but a treasure trove of untold magnitude is yours for the taking.

    By the same logic your professor is using, all diamond mines in the world should be closed as an unproductive waste of time.

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  12. By the same logic, panel discussions with questions from the audience are also shallow. They are, after all, verbal, quick-moving blogs.

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    The Nameless Nomadic Nanny

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  13. By the same logic, all log books from all scientific expeditions from any generation of time should be discounted as shallow.

    Blog, after all, is a contraction for Web Log, a log book published electronically instead of on dead trees.

    Darwin, Cook, Lewis and Clark, Powell, sorry, folks, but you've been judged and found shallow.

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    The Nameless Nomadic Nanny

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  14. And NASA might as well quit taking pictures with the Hubble Telescope. The pictures, after all, come bit by bit, one at a time, without any coherent organization.

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    The Nameless Nomadic Nanny

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  15. And while we're at it, scouring attics for undiscovered great works of music is a huge waste of time, we'll never find anything interesting. Forget you, JS Bach, it just wasn't worth the effort to dig up your junk.

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    The Nameless Nomadic Nanny

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  16. Let's also tell the archaelogists that they can quit digging and go home.

    If modern electronic blogs are shallow and uninteresting, blogs that are thousands of years old and written on papyrus or pottery must be wholly without merit.

    And if modern electronic doodling is a waste, then caveman doodling on cave walls must be a waste, too. Those old pictures of bison only give have the pretention of depth.

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    The Nameless Nomadic Nanny

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  17. Those are good points, but they don't really address the concerns of the professor, which were centered on James's essay in particular, which was pieces of his blog presented in a blog-like way when what the professor had asked for was a personal essay. I can definitely see the professor's point when comparing the standard personal essay form to the blog form. I've seen some really excellent blog posts that I thought had some fabulous raw material that had the potential to be shaped into awesome personal essays or even, if expanded upon, book-length memoirs.

    I think that the lack of editing, the rawness of blogging makes it an excellent medium to experiment with material--to draft. But I would also sympathize with someone who thought the personal essay form was deeper, more cohesive, less casual. In fact, it seems to me that the only difference between blog posts and personal essays is just that--the level of formality and the amount of time the author invests in the piece.

    Of course you can find diamonds in a diamond mine, but when you're a student turning in a creative writing assignment, I don't think that's going to strengthen your case if the professor thinks that your particular essay is lazy or shallow. But the professor probably should have clarified (1) why he thinks blogging is shallow and (2) how that was manifested in James's essay.

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  18. P.S. For those interested, this reminds me of an excellent blog post that addresses this very subject. The comments are also really good: http://www.motleyvision.org/2008/guest-post-theric-jepson-on-the-sin-of-saint-onan/

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  19. Newspaper columns are also near kin to blogs. Sorry, Ann Landers, you have been relegated to eternal superficiality.

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    The Nameless Nomadic Nanny

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  20. Thanks, Katherine, for that link! Clearly, there is legitimate tension over the role of blogging in the literary community today, and I think the people at A Motley Vision do a good job of discussing what is attractive and what is alarming.

    Only playing with the form, though, will do much to show us what can come of it. If the blog form is shallow, maybe there are ways to play with it that can lead to added depth.

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  21. I'd also note that while many of the forms NNN has mentioned can have depth, they're certainly not traditional literary forms-- aside from the serial novel and the short story, all of the forms mentioned fall into non-literary categories. And none of the referenced blogs are literary, although they serve to provide depth in their fields of experience or expertise.

    So I think the real question the professor was getting at is whether the blog, as a form, is able to serve literary ends-- whether it can carry the types of meaning, the type of depth, that we expect from essays, novels and poems. And I don't think that's an easy question to answer.

    Perhaps he was hasty to say the blog is by-definition shallow, but we would also be hasty to say that he's flat out wrong without seriously considering whether blogs can achieve literary depth. Can a blog be art, or is it always going to be more like a journal (personal or scientific)?

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  22. The traditional classroom lecture/Q&A form, being basically the same format as a blog, is, by the same logic, doomed to be shallow. I therefore propose that we cancel all classes for the rest of eternity.

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    The Nameless Nomadic Nanny

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  23. Some people write poetry in their journal. Does that qualify as art?

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    The Nameless Nomadic Nanny

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  24. What of the Japanese poetry form where multiple poets congregate and take turns writing verses of the same poem, sort of a round robin serial poem? (It has been too many years since my Asian History classwork, but a quick Google search turned up "Renga," literally "linked verse," which does sound vaguely familiar.)

    Similarly, I've run across novels where multiple authors congregate, each author writing a chapter.

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    The Nameless Nomadic Nanny

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  25. Is there an artistic difference between poets posting their own poems to a blog versus printing them in a dead-tree book of poetry?

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    The Nameless Nomadic Nanny

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  26. Does writing (or language in general) need to be polished to be considered deep or artistic?

    In my high school history class, my teacher "Rosie the Riveter" McKay pointed out that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe had a huge social impact even though Uncle Tom and other characters used, well, less than polished language.

    Wikipedia claims that one contemporary literary critic described the book as "primarily a derivative piece of hack work." Would a modern evaluation agree?

    (As an aside, Wikipedia claims that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was first published as a 40-week serial.)

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    The Nameless Nomadic Nanny

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  27. Is a diary detailing a human soul's desperate struggle through life entirely devoid of literary or artistic meaning? Is the purpose of literature and art something other than to increase our understanding of the human condition?

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    The Nameless Nomadic Nanny

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  28. Are well written technical or scientific works entirely devoid of literary or artistic meaning?

    One of my favorite computer programming manuals is "The TeXbook" by Donald Knuth. In addition to instructing the student in the details of the TeX electronic typesetting language, the book contains (often archaic) poetry on the subject of typesetting and printing, social satire, and considerable insight on humanity in general.

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    The Nameless Nomadic Nanny

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  29. The thing NNN has convinced me of is that so many things have been proven to work with literary forms that slighting ANY potential form is counter-productive. So many things have been proven to work in their own cultural context that "my form is better than your form" contentions are probably outdated.

    I think that strict definitions of what forms are legit are probably based on (subconscious) efforts to maintain an existing hierarchy at the expense of the dynamic communitive process creative writing is supposed to be.

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  30. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  31. That is a good point. It's not fair to be dismissive of literary forms, because they all have their uses. Which again, is why I'm interested in what your professor meant. What does he look for in a personal essay that he doesn't find in a blog post? I guess that sort of sums up my questions. If you ever find the opportunity to ask him, maybe you can let us know. Or, you know, just have him guest post his response on your blog. ;-)

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  32. The "Is this blog deep?" poll attached to this post got 13 votes--an inauspicious number. The results were as follows:

    Yes. Form times author is a double negative here.

    8 (61%)

    No, the blog form is deep but James is shallow.

    6 (46%)

    No, the blog form is shallow but James is deep.

    4 (30%)

    Yes. Form and author are both deep and I am a student who wants to suck up.

    5 (38%)

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