Books about blogs in the New York Review of Books

January 25, 2008 10:53 AM

"Blogs", by Sarah Boxer in The New York Review of Books. An essay concerning books about blogs. Boxer, former New York Times reporter and critic, is author of the forthcoming Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web (NPR interview), an anthology of the best of blogs.
posted by stbalbach (26 comments total)

ID these blogs (from the description in the Amazon link):

two fashion critics mocking the inexplicable “fugliness” of celebrities
a Marine Corps lieutenant stationed in Fallujah in 2006
a 19-year old student in Singapore cheerfully pining for her ex
an illustrator’s tiny saga of a rodent and his ball of crap
Odysseus’s sidekick telling his side of the Iliad and Odyssey

I only know one of them. Not much of blog reader.
posted by iconomy at 10:58 AM on January 25, 2008

I didn't see an export-to-lucrative-book-deal button in Firefox. Is this some IE7 feature I'm unaware of?
posted by mhoye at 11:01 AM on January 25, 2008 [1 favorite]

This is painfully incomplete without a link to Chewbacca's blog.
posted by mullingitover at 11:03 AM on January 25, 2008

Thomas Jones discussed the book here in the LRB: 'Publishing an anthology of blogs in book form... would appear to make about as much sense as broadcasting Singin’ in the Rain on the wireless...'.
posted by Mocata at 11:05 AM on January 25, 2008

I don't have a lot of hope for a book about blogs from an author who puts a space in "online". Then again, she's writing for an audience that apparently has to have :-) explained.

Actually, it's a pretty good history/explanation for someone who has been in a coma....let me start again. A pretty good history/explanation for my grandmo....sorry. A pretty good history/explanation.
posted by DU at 11:06 AM on January 25, 2008

The lady seems a bit perplexed that bloggers can be so crude,rude,arrogant etc. The simple answer: you don't like what they do or say, you don't go there. With magazines and papers, there is the continuing constraint of subscriptions and audience and of course ads. If I call someone a dolt on my blog, so what? If I do that for, say The New York Times, I would be waiting for the Bush rebate to get carfare to look for a new job.
posted by Postroad at 11:16 AM on January 25, 2008

One of the blogs featured in her book discusses it here

And she is right about click opera at least. An embarrasment of riches on a daily basis.
posted by post punk at 11:24 AM on January 25, 2008

This seems like it'll be outdated before it ever gets published.
posted by BridgetR at 11:27 AM on January 25, 2008

The lady seems a bit perplexed that bloggers can be so crude,rude,arrogant etc.

No she doesn't. She seems perfectly comfortable with it, and has a good if not particularly original analogy: "Blogging at its freest is like going to a masked ball." The essay was actually not nearly as bad as I expected, print-media types being notoriously clueless and resentful about this newfangled blogging stuff; Boxer seems to get it in some basic sense. But she can't resist the lure of the easy stereotype:

Finally, I think I get the superhero fixation. It's the flying. It's the suspension of punctuation and good manners and even identity. Bloggers at their computers are Supermen in flight. They break the rules. They go into their virtual phone booths, put on their costumes, bring down their personal villains, and save the world. Anonymous or not, they inhabit that source of power and hope. Then they come back to their jobs, their dogs, and their lives, and it's like, "Dude, the ball."

When will print-media types realize that there are all kinds of bloggers, and choosing to mock one particular variety (in this case, the superhero-obsessed type) says more about you than about bloggers? This woman quotes [MeFi's own] Mark Liberman and mentions Language Log and she can't figure out that the Superman thing is a pathetic cliché and that there are as many varieties of blog as there are of print media? Ah well, give them another ten years...
posted by languagehat at 11:51 AM on January 25, 2008

Mentions Jorn Barger, doesn't mention Justin Hall. FAIL.
posted by RogerB at 12:05 PM on January 25, 2008

I just read this article before I saw it linked here, and it seems like pretty weak sauce to me. NYRB expose reveals: blogging is less formal than journalism and hews to different standards of discourse! At least she didn't resort to getting her daughter's friends to explain this new-fangled internet thing to her or something, though.

Click opera's response, linked by post punk above, and the Washington Post article about Japanese blogging that he links to, seem a lot more interesting than the NYRB article itself. Can 37% of blog postings really be in Japanese now?
posted by whir at 12:50 PM on January 25, 2008

Publishing an anthology of blogs in book form, then, would appear to make about as much sense as broadcasting Singin’ in the Rain on the wireless

I've always thought an anthology of Metafilter's best threads and comments throughout its history would be pretty cool. (It would have to cover Ask MeFi, too, so it could include this classic.) But I do understand: pretty cool != viable market.
posted by effwerd at 12:57 PM on January 25, 2008

Is this something I would have to have an "on line computer" to understand?
posted by infinitywaltz at 1:15 PM on January 25, 2008

When will print-media types realize...

Oh, languagehat, don't you see that you're tarring "print media types" with the exact same too-broad brush that they often tar bloggers?

Truth is, there's variety in both, but at the same time, some voices in both camps rise above the rest. It might not be inaccurate to associate journalists with an arrogant, dismissive attitude towards blogs. It would be just as valid to associate bloggers with a nasal, aggrevated tone that suggests they're the truth and light in the world.

But these attitudes are mostly held by bloggers who blog about blogging, and journalists who write about the media. I get so tired of it. Meanwhile, everyone else just happily goes about blogging and writing about their own stuff, cogniscant that bloggers vs. journalists is an outdated, useless argument.

The real question is about what constitutes good journalism, whatever medium it's published in.
posted by bicyclefish at 1:55 PM on January 25, 2008

I'm pretty sure the decision to print 'on line' was made by the NYRB editors rather than the writer.
posted by Mocata at 2:36 PM on January 25, 2008

bicyclefish got it. It's just as lazy for bloggers to complain about print media as the print media to complain about bloggers. Meanwhile, writers from both camps are doing both print and blogging which makes the whole logical proposition silly - who doesn't blog these days? Boxer didn't frame her article in a print-media vs bloggers argument, but took a more nuanced and complex look at the blogging world compared to the more familiar print media world. It certainly is valid to compare these two as it exposes their commonalities and differences.

The real question is about what constitutes good journalism, whatever medium it's published in.

Yeah. Specifically, how do we know if its reliable journalism - the Internet removes the authority gatekeeper, anyone can publish - the other side of the coin is how do we know what is authoritative? It's a problem.
posted by stbalbach at 2:37 PM on January 25, 2008

Yeah, though in fairness, I'm not sure if that gatekeeper was ever that helpful. The Internet removed the barriers to access, but there were never any guarantees that the people who used to have exclusive access to the media were any good either - just because they had money and means. (Hello there, Rupert.)

I think we're coming up with new and more nuanced definitions of authoritativeness, where respect and prestige (and, unfortunately, popularity) count more than access to means.
posted by bicyclefish at 4:57 PM on January 25, 2008

Oh, languagehat, don't you see that you're tarring "print media types" with the exact same too-broad brush that they often tar bloggers?

bicyclefish got it. It's just as lazy for bloggers to complain about print media as the print media to complain about bloggers.

See, I'd love to agree with you, because I'm all about even-handedness and not stereotyping and all that good stuff, but the fact is I've never seen a single fair, knowledgeable, and interesting piece about blogging from the mainstream media. This Boxer piece is about as good as it gets, and that's not saying a whole lot. I've seen plenty of knowledgeable, incisive discussion of the mainstream media by bloggers. But maybe I've just been unlucky. Go ahead, prove me wrong; I like being proven wrong. Point me to a really good discussion (with no condescension, no "aren't these kiddies cute?" attitude) of blogging by a mainstream journalist. Make my day.
posted by languagehat at 6:16 PM on January 25, 2008

I'm not sure about blogging specifically, but Richard Lanham has some sophisticated discussions about the new media and culture. I've only read one book by him The Economics of Attention (ignore the poor amazon reviews, this is a deep book and takes some intelligence to follow, it's a bit outside the "popular science" crowd). There are other professors out there like him who apply their field of expertise (rhetoric in Lanham's case) to new media. Fairly sure there are some smart folks writing about blogging and culture from an academic perspective, and not the popularization journalists usually take. In fact, the NYRoB FPP discusses 10 books about blogs (not all worthwhile though).
posted by stbalbach at 6:42 PM on January 25, 2008

but the fact is I've never seen a single fair, knowledgeable, and interesting piece about blogging from the mainstream media.

And I've never seen a fair, knowlegable, interesting piece about blogging from a blogger. Quite simply, it's too much of a broad, diffuse topic for there to be much meaningful analysis of it.

I mean look what "blogs" are, these days.

14 year olds posting their diaries on MySpace are now "blogs".
Sites where people give tips on digital photography are now "blogs".
Amature porn sites offer their members "blogs".
Highly partisan sites where people launch political attacks on the other side, and have lame little bitch-fights in the comments section are now "blogs".
People publish blogs about their favourite products and merchandise - Moleskine, anyone?
People publish mp3 blogs, photo blogs.
Blogging has been reduced to the minimalism of Twitter or Tumblr.
Blogging has been expanded in the other direction so that some people use their blog to write books, post by post, or they put up 28-page long essays online on their blog.
Mainstream media sites all have "blogs" now, as a kind of low-rent replacement for opinion columns.
Blogs began with RobotWisdom and Slashdot.
Blogs began on 9/11.
Blogs began with Blogger.
And, somewhere, some people still use blogs as "Weblogs", to post links to cool shit on the internet. Like Metafilter.

I saw a kid's magazine on sale at the checkout counter at my local supermarket a few months ago - on the cover it advertised that the 'zine came with "Your Own Free Blog-Book!". And indeed it did. A little, lime-green notebook with "BLOG" printed on the front was included in the shrinkwrap.

Face it. At the end of the day, a blog is just an automated publishing system that lets you put content online without messing with an FTP server, with the useful feature of putting the latest thing you've posted at the top of the page. There's only so much analysis you can do on that before you crawl up your own arsehole.
posted by Jimbob at 9:38 PM on January 25, 2008 [1 favorite]

Chewbacca needs to get with photobucket.

I know we hate to nitpick on mefi, but it would have been wise to namedrop Joi Ito along with the aforementioned Justin Hall.

I also have a dream that someone will actually research the 37% of blog posts are in Japanese stat one day and realize it's not true.
posted by ejoey at 3:37 AM on January 26, 2008

stbalbach: But you're changing the subject. We were talking specifically about journalists, and now you're saying there are "smart folks writing about blogging and culture from an academic perspective." I'm sure there are, but that doesn't address my point.

Jimbob: Don't be ridiculous. You could say the same thing about print or pretty much anything else: "it's too much of a broad, diffuse topic for there to be much meaningful analysis of it." And yet there's plenty of meaningful analysis of print, and nationalism, and religion, and all sorts of broad topics. There's no reason blogging should be any different.
posted by languagehat at 5:43 AM on January 26, 2008

I know it's a self-link, but I wrote it in 1999 so its not a terribly wicked one; and I still think this is reasonably fair, interested and knowledgeable (at least for what could be known about blogs nine years ago) and the New Statesman is fairly mainstream media.
posted by alloneword at 5:50 AM on January 26, 2008

You're right, that was an excellent piece, and I will no longer be able to say I have not read one. I like your conclusion:

What really distinguishes a blog from a normal home page, though, is that it is made by someone who likes reading, and expects their visitors to do so. ...

Blogs are never going to be big business and they're not the future of the web, either. But I find that I visit them more and more because in the blogs you can still find that educated, anarchic spirit - rather as I imagine medieval universities to have been, full of wandering scholars - which once seemed the natural atmosphere of the whole World Wide Web.

Why can't more mainstream people focus on the better blogs, just as they expect people to discuss newspapers in terms of the NY Times or the Guardian rather than some barely literate local rag?
posted by languagehat at 7:00 AM on January 26, 2008

We were talking specifically about journalists

Let's see.. journalist Lee Siegel just published a little book (extended essay) called Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob about blogs. I have not read it yet, looks like something in the vein of Cult of the Amateur, it's about the situation he had with the New Republic (discussed in the WP article). In general though I think your right that journalists are not the best source since they have inherent conflict of interest.
posted by stbalbach at 7:05 AM on January 26, 2008

But would an analysis of print try to cover everything from the technical aspects behind the daily run of the New York Times, through to the content churned out by little Tommy down the road with his plastic, hand-cranked roller press? Everything from Gutenberg to The Dummy's Guide to Knitting? Major players in the medium from Robert Burns to Cory Doctrow? All in 1,500 words.

Hell no. It would be nonsensical. But this is exactly what most investigations of blogging try to do - and on top of that they only have about ten years of history to base it on. It's just a medium, and a fairly boring, technical one at that.

But hang on... Your comment actually captures what I'm trying to say. Why can't more mainstream people focus on the better blogs, just as they expect people to discuss newspapers in terms of the NY Times or the Guardian rather than some barely literate local rag?

That piece does do a better job than usual, by accepting that this topic has to be sliced and diced a bit in order to be in any way interesting.
posted by Jimbob at 10:12 AM on January 26, 2008