Over
the last couple of months, I've been posting on a group blog called languagelog.org, which was
launched by a couple of linguists as a place where we could vent our
comments on the passing linguistic scene.
Still, I don't quite have the hang of the form. The style that sounds
perfectly normal in a public radio feature or an op-ed piece comes off
as distant and pontifical when I use it in a blog entry. Reading over
my own postings, I recall what Queen Victoria once said about
Gladstone: "He speaks to me as if I were a public meeting."
I'm not the only one with this problem. A lot of newspapers have been
encouraging or even requiring their writers to start blogs. But with
some notable exceptions, most journalists have the same problems that I
do. They do all the things you should do in a newspaper feature. They
fashion engaging ledes, they develop their arguments methodically, they
give context and background, and tack helpful ID's onto the names they
introduce -- "New York Senator Charles E. Schumer (D)."
That makes for solid journalism, but it's not really blogging. Granted,
that word can cover a lot of territory. A recent Pew Foundation study
found that around three million Americans have tried their hands at
blogging, and sometimes there seem to be almost that many variants of
the form. Blogs can be news summaries, opinion columns, or collections
of press releases, like the official blogs of the presidential
candidates. But the vast majority are journals posted by college
students, office workers, or stay-at-home moms, whose average
readership is smaller than a family Christmas letter. (The blog hosting
site livejournal.com reports
that two thirds of bloggers are women -- I'm not sure what to make of
that proportion.)
But when people puzzle over the significance of blogs nowadays, they
usually have in mind a small number of A-List sites that traffic in
commentary about politics, culture, or technology -- blogs like Altercation, Instapundit, Matthew Yglesias, Talking Points or Doc Searls. It's true that bloggers
like these have occasionally come up with news scoops, but in the end
they're less about breaking stories than bending them. And their
language is a kind of anti-journalese. It's informal, impertinent, and
digressive, casting links in all directions. In fact one archetypal
blog entry consists entirely of a cryptic comment that's linked to
another blog or a news item -- "Oh, please," or "He's
married to her?"
That interconnectedness is what leads enthusiasts to talk about the
blogosphere, as if this were all a single vast conversation -- at some
point in these discussions, somebody's likely to trot out the phrase "collective
mind." But if there's a new public sphere assembling itself out
there, you couldn't tell from the way bloggers address their readers --
not as anonymous citizens, the way print columnists do, but as
co-conspirators who are in on the joke.
Taken
as a whole, in fact, the blogging world sounds a lot less like a public
meeting than the lunchtime chatter in a high-school cafeteria, complete
with snarky comments about the kids at the tables across the room.
(Bloggers didn't invent the word snarky, but they've had a lot
to do with turning it into the metrosexual equivalent of bitchy.
On the Web, blogs account for more than three times as large a share of the total
occurrences of snarky as of the occurrences of irony.)1
Some people say this all started with Mickey Kaus's column in Slate,
though Kaus himself cites
the old San Francisco Chronicle columns of Herb Caen. And
Camille Paglia not surprisingly claims
that her column in Salon.com was the first true blog, and adds that the
genre has been going downhill ever since.
But blogs were around on the Web well before Kaus or Paglia first logged in.2
And if you're of a mind to, you can trace their print antecedents a lot
further back than Caen or Hunter S. Thompson. That informal style
recalls the colloquial voice that Addison and Steele devised when they
invented the periodical essay in the early 18th century, even if few
blogs come close to that in artfulness. Then too, those essays were
written in the guise of fictive personae like Isaac Bickerstaff and Sir
Roger de Coverly, who could be the predecessors of pseudonymous bloggers like Wonkette, Atrios, or Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, not to
mention the
mysterious conservative blogger who goes by the name of Edward Boyd. 3
For that matter, my languagelog co-contributor Mark Liberman recalls
that Plato always had Socrates open his philosophical disquisitions
with a little diary entry, the way bloggers like to do: "I went down
yesterday to see the festival at the Peiraeus with Glaucon, the son of
Ariston, and I ran into my old buddy Cephalus and we got to talking
about old age…"
Of course whenever a successful new genre emerges, it seems to have
been implicit in everything that preceded it. But in the end, this a
mug's game, like asking whether the first SUV was a minivan, a station
wagon, or an off-road vehicle.
The fact is that this is a genuinely new language of public discourse
-- and a paradoxical one. On the one hand, blogs are clearly a more
democratic form of expression than anything the world of print has
produced. But in some ways they're also more exclusionary, and not just
because they only reach about a tenth
of the people who use the Web.4 The high,
formal style of the newspaper op-ed page may be nobody's native
language, but at least it's a neutral voice that doesn't privilege the
speech of any particular group or class. Whereas blogspeak is basically
an adaptation of the table talk of the urban middle class -- it isn't a
language that everybody in
the cafeteria is equally adept at speaking. Not that there's anything
wrong with chewing over the events of
the day with the other folks at the lunch table, but you hope that
everybody in the room is at least reading the same newspapers at
breakfast. 5
NOTES
1. This is a rough estimate, arrived at by
taking the proportion of total Google hits for a word that occur in a
document that also contains the word blog:
snarky:
87,700
snarky + blog: 32,600 (37 %)
irony: 1,600,000
irony + blog: 168,000 (10.5 %)
Of
course the fact that the word blog appears in a page doesn't
necessarily mean that it is a blog, but it turns out that more than 90
percent of the pages containing the word are blog pages, and in any
case, the effect would be the same for both terms. And while some part
of this variation no doubt reflects the status of snarky as a
colloquial word that is less likely to show up in serious literary
discussions and the like, the effect is nowhere near so marked when we
look at the word bitchy:
bitchy:
250,000
bitchy + blog: 43,700 (17.5%)
That
is, the specialization to blogs is more than twice as high for snarky
as for bitchy, even though both are colloquial items. Return
2. Many have given credit for inventing the
genre to Dave Winer, whose Scripting
News was one of the earliest weblogs, though Winer himself says that the
first weblog was Tim Berners-Lee's page at CERN. But you could argue
that blog has moved out from under the derivational shadow of
its etymon -- the word isn't just a truncation of weblog
anymore. In which case, the identity of the first "real blog" is
anybody's guess -- and it almost certainly will be. Return
3. James
Wolcott makes a similar comparison
in the current Vanity Fair, and goes so far as to suggest that " If
Addison and Steele, the editors of The Spectator and The
Tatler, were alive and holding court at Starbucks, they'd be
WiFi-ing into a joint blog."
That's
cute, but I think it gets Addison and Steele wrong -- the studied
effusions of Isaac Bickertaff and Sir Roger de Coverly may have sounded
like blogs, but they were fashioned with an eye towards a more enduring
literary fame. Which is not to say that blogs couldn't become the basis
for a genuine literary form. As I noted in a "Fresh Air"
piece a few years ago that dealt more with blogs as personal journals:
There's
something very familiar about that accretion of diurnal detail. It's
what the novel was trying to achieve when eighteenth-century writers
cobbled it together out of subliterary genres like personal letters,
journals, and newspapers, with the idea of reproducing the inner and
outer experience that makes up daily life. You wonder whether anything
as interesting could grow up in the intimate anonymity of cyberspace.
(See "I Have Seen the Future, and It Blogs," in Going
Nucular, PublicAffairs, May, 2004.)
So
it's not surprising that a number of
fictional blogs ("flogs"? "blictions"?) have begun to emerge,
adapting the tradition of the fictional diary that runs from Robinson
Crusoe to Bridget Jones' Diary. As to whether that will
ultimately amount to "anything as interesting" as the novel, the jury
is likely to be out for a while. Return
4. The Pew study found that 11% of Internet
users have read
the blogs or diaries of other Internet users. Return
5.
For a diverting picture of the blogosphere-as-lunchroom, see Whitney
Pastorek's recent piece in
the Village Voice, "Blogging Off." Return
