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Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Wednesday, April 17, 2013 - 10:25 PM
A. Iain Johnston has the lead article in the latest issue of International Security. It's available for free right now, and it's quite the doozy. Entitled "How New and Assertive is China's New Assertiveness?", Johnston picks apart the claim made by many (including your humble blogger) that China's post-2008 foreign policy represented anything all that much out of the ordinary. From the abstract:
There has been a rapidly spreading meme in U.S. pundit and academic circles since 2010 that describes China's recent diplomacy as “newly assertive.” This “new assertiveness” meme suffers from two problems. First, it underestimates the complexity of key episodes in Chinese diplomacy in 2010 and overestimates the amount of change. Second, the explanations for the new assertiveness claim suffer from unclear causal mechanisms and lack comparative rigor that would better contextualize China's diplomacy in 2010. An examination of seven cases in Chinese diplomacy at the heart of the new assertiveness meme finds that, in some instances, China's policy has not changed; in others, it is actually more moderate; and in still others, it is a predictable reaction to changed external conditions. In only one case—maritime disputes—does one see more assertive Chinese rhetoric and behavior.
Johnston has forgotten more about Chinese foreign policy than I will ever learn, so I'd encourage you to give the whole piece a read. My take is that I'm actually not that far apart from Johnston. As he notes, China's foreign policy had its share of belligerent episodes prior to 2008. He also acknowledges that there has been some movement by China on a couple of issues, including the maritime disputes. He also omits any discussion of some of the cases that I've highlighted on the blog, including the reaction to Liu Xiaobo's Nobel Peace Prize, as well as the kerfuffle with Google.
What's really interesting, however, is the second part of that abstract:
The speed and extent with which the newly assertive meme has emerged point to an understudied issue in international relations—namely, the role that online media and the blogosphere play in the creation of conventional wisdoms that might, in turn, constrain policy debates. The assertive China discourse may be a harbinger of this effect as a Sino-U.S. security dilemma emerges (emphasis added).
Whoa there!! Bloggers are constraining policy debates?
Here's the relevant passage from the article itself (p. 46-47):
The conventional description of Chinese diplomacy in 2010 seems to point to a new, but poorly understood, factor in international relations—namely, the speed with which new conventional wisdoms are created, at least within the public sphere, by the interaction of the internet-based traditional media and the blogosphere. One study has found, for instance, that on some U.S. public policy issues, the blogosphere and the traditional media interact in setting the agenda for coverage for each other. Moreover, on issues where this interaction occurs, much of the effect happens within four days. Other research suggests that political bloggers, for the most part, do not engage in original reporting and instead rely heavily on the mainstream media for the reproduction of alleged facts. The media, meanwhile, increasingly refers to blogs as source material. The result is, as one study put it, “a news source cycle, in which news content can be passed back and forth from media to media.” Additional research suggests that the thematic agendas for political campaigns and politicians themselves are increasingly influenced by blogosphere-media interaction.
Together, this research suggests that the prevailing framework for characterizing Chinese foreign policy in recent years may be relevant for the further development (and possible narrowing) of the policy discourse among media, think tank, and policy elites. As the agenda-setting literature suggests, this is not a new phenomenon. What is new, however, is the speed with which these narratives are created and spread—a discursive tidal wave, if you will. This gives first movers with strong policy preferences advantages in producing and circulating memes and narratives in the electronic media or in high-profile blogs, or both. This, in turn, further reduces the time and incentives for participants in policy debates to conduct rigorous comparative analysis prior to participation.
And here I'm going to have to disagree with Johnston a bit. On a day in which the mainstream media demonstrated a truly excellent ability to spread its own misinformation -- and, in response, said mainstream media blamed Twitter -- I'm highly dubious that the blogs play that much of a causal role. To be sure, I do think blogs can sometimes perpetuate falsehoods. That said, most of Johnston's evidence for blog effects comes from domestic policy, and methinks the foreign policy media ecosystem functions a wee bit differently.
If I had to wager why the misperceptions about China that Johnston enumerates have emerged, I'd hypothesize, in descending order of importance, the following reasons:
1) Foreign affairs columnists and international relations analysts who hadn't paid that much attention to China prior to 2008 had no choice but to pay a lot of attention to Beijing after the financial crisis;
2) Interest groups in the United States that were traditionally predisposed towards a more dovish view of China started feeling burned by Beijing on matters unrelated to security.
3) The media likes a trend, and a lot of the incidents that Johnston chronicles took place in rapid-fire fashion from the end of 2009 to the middle of 2010.
4) The Obama administration's rebalancing strategy validated the perception that China was doing something different.
5) Blogs acted as an amplifier for all of these other trends.
What's ironic about this is that in the article, Johnston properly takes a lot of the conventional wisdom to task for ahistoricism and problematic causal arguments in assessing Chinese behavior after 2008. I'd wager, however, that Johnston has done the exact same thing with respect to the foreign policy blogosphere.
What do you think?
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Friday, May 4, 2012 - 2:52 PM
Your humble blogger has spent the last 48 hours trying to follow up on his last Chen Guangcheng post. Unfortunately, a recurrent cycle emerged that has caused some serious delays:
STEP 1: Development in Chen case
STEP 2: Me cogitating on development
STEP 3: Brilliant insights that will transform the Sino-American relationship emerge from blog brain.
STEP 4: Start writing blog post
STEP 5: Check Twitter feed five minutes later
STEP 6: New development in Chen case that renders prior insights totally overtaken by events.
STEP 7: Trash draft of blog post... go back to Step 1.
Seriously, I think I get web 2.0 stuff pretty well, and I have never dealt with an ongoing policy issue that mutated faster than I could blog about it.
I think the latest developments have stabilized matters a bit, so I promise a follow-up blog post in the next hour. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Thursday, December 29, 2011 - 6:45 AM
Bloggingheads as we know it will be ending with the end of 2011. My last diavlog, recorded with NSN's Heather Hurlburt, covers our fearless predictions for next year, as well as the dream diplomatic postings both of us desire. Enjoy!
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Wednesday, June 15, 2011 - 7:14 PM
Yesterday I gave a small talk to the International Policy Summer Institute on the benefits, costs, risks, and how-tos of foreign policy blogs. The audience consisted mostly of junior faculty, and their questions and concerns were pretty reasonable: the time commitment, the reputational impact, and so forth.
I bring this up because the one thing that went unmentioned was money. This is interesting, as apparently there's a bit of a kerfuffle involving the Huffington Post not paying many of its bloggers. According to an outraged Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:
[T]he Newspapers Guild and the National Writers Union have called a boycott against Huffington Post for refusing to pay its writers....
I completely support this boycott. I refuse to read anything at HuffPo or to link there. Ultimately, HuffPo is surviving on the adjunct model. Like higher education with its hordes of PhDs with no job prospects, there is a huge supply of writers who want to make a living in journalism. HuffPo offers the promise of gaining valuable experience and readership so that someday, maybe, you can make it big.
This is a dishonest proposition by HuffPo. It is almost impossible in 2011 to go from a no one to a big name blogger. The blogosphere is ossified. During the explosion of the medium from 2004-06, young writers could produce excellent work and become big name people. Then, by 2007, those were the only blogs people read. Today, those are the prominent and still young writers of the... blogosphere. And they aren’t going anywhere.
This prompted a fair amount of pushback from Julian Sanchez and Matthew Yglesias, which in turn prompted a rejoinder from Loomis, which prompted another rebuttal from Yglesias.
My thoughts:
1) Loomis is correct to note that there was a window during which one could vault into public prominence via the blog, and that this window is much narrower now than it was 8 or 9 years ago. I, for one, was lucky to start blogging when I did.
2) That said, I don't quite buy the "ossified" descriptor. It might be more accurate to say that it's become much tougher to crack the general interest blogosphere. If one has a specialty -- like, say, Chinese foreign policy -- then the barriers to entry are still pretty low. More importantly, however, inequality is embedded into the powe- law structure of the blogosphere. There will always be a very few people who will command the overwhellming bulk of the traffic. Those people -- and only those people -- will make money over the long run.
3) From day one, I always looked at the blog as a "loss leader" for two additional goals -- policy influence and other writing opportunities. I've been genuinely surprised that, in the end, the blog itself has made some coin.
4) Julian Sanchez's last observation seems about right to me:
[Loomis'] guiding principle is that “large corporations have the obligation to pay workers for labor.” And there’s the rub: The Internet economy does tend to blur the lines between “work” and things that are done for pleasure, or at any rate, from motives other than monetary compensation. If your main mental point of reference is an industrial sweatshop, it’s easy to assume that this is some kind of cover for exploitation—downtrodden workers “agreeing” to work for subsistence wages because they have no other choice if they want to feed themselves. The trouble is that Loomis is trying to impose an industrial model, where people fall neatly into categories like “worker” and “employer” and “capitalist” on an Internet economy characterized by what Yochai Benkler calls “peer production.” At the heart of that model is the idea that lots of people, acting from motives other than direct expectation of monetary compensation, can produce enormous social surpluses in aggregate.
Speaking personally, this blog functions as a mixture of play {Yes!!--ed.] and work [Crap! This means we have to keep paying you, doesn't it?!--ed.] The play sometimes leads to work, and the work often feels like play.
The more important point, however, is unpaid bloggers do get a benefit by writing for HuffPo. The Huffington Post can provide newbie bloggers a platform with a little more institutional allure than, say, Tumblr. Or, as Sanchez put it:
The irony here is that it’s the unknown writers looking to get started who’d most likely lose out if HuffPo were bullied into only publishing paid content. Sure, they curate their blogs now, but they can afford to be relatively inclusive when it comes to the free writers—handing the keys to a large number of people and saying, in effect, “write as much or as little as you please.” If they’ve got to start paying people—which means administrative overhead on top of the actual fee for the writer—there’s a strong incentive to be more selective. So who gets cut? Not the “big names” Loomis says he’s not worried about, but the no-names who aren’t guaranteed to pull in traffic, or maybe the marginal paid staffer who’s no longer sufficiently subsidized by the ad revenue from the volunteer bloggers.
In my little word of IPE, demanding that blogs be pay-for-play would benefit "name" experts like Joseph Nye or Niall Ferguson. It would hurt anyone without any name recognition. As someone who wants more IR experts in blogspace, this would be a Very Bad Thing.
UPDATE: Well, among the perks I forgot to list was the awesome possibility of being investigated by the CIA.
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Tuesday, October 12, 2010 - 10:55 AM
Over the weekend I finally saw The Social Network and read Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker essay about social networks. Both Gladwell and Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter for The Social Network, have their issues with futurists who embrace these technologies as the beginning of a social revolution.
Now I'm pretty sympathetic to these arguments. In the past, I've expressed a fair amount of ambivalence about the power of Internet technologies to transform the world. After reading the essay and watching the movie, however, I can't say I'm all that convinced by their theses.
Let's start with Gladwell, because it's the lesser of the two arguments. Gladwell contrasts the relationships and connections forged on Twitter/Facebook with real-world movements. He argues that the latter work when based on a hierarchical structure with strong ties among the participants. The former is based on a networked structure with weak ties. Therefore:
This sounds good, except this doesn't describe networks all that well. Networks eliminate neither hierarchical power nor strong ties -- they're simply expressed in different ways. Actors in central nodes, with lots of dynamic density among other actors, can command both power and discipline. Not all networks will look like this, but the ones successful at fomenting change will likely resemble it. To put it more precisely: social networks lower the transactions costs for creating both weak ties and strong ties, loose collaborations and more tightly integrated social movements.
It's not either/or, a point Oliver Willis raises:
Things bubble over to real world via social networking when influencers push the influenced to do something. Social networks tend to magnify this, and the web does give some of us who would never be real-life leaders a way of having some sway. I find it odd that Gladwell misses this, because this is the whole point of his bestseller The Tipping Point.
I’ve no doubt that getting your followers to do something in the real world is more complicated than getting them to retweet or “Like” something, but I don’t think the barrier to doing that is social networking’s distributed nature but rather the intensity of the network following you. But this is the same as in the real world. Network leaders need to have leadership skills no matter the medium.
The movie The Social Network was far more interesting. There is some controversy over what's been fictionalized, what's been mysoginized, and what's been left out of the film, and I'm sympathetic to some of these arguments. Taking what was intended to be on the screen, however, The Social Network also suggests the ways in which offline and online structures intersect. There were many reasons for Facebook's rise, but I have to think that the site's initial exculsivity helped to give it something that MySpace and Friendster lacked.
The film has many great moments (if Aaron Sorkin was meant to translate any real-life figure onto film, it was Larry Summers). Both the ending and Sorkin's interviews about the film, however, suggests that there's an emptiness at the core of Facebook that hollows out 21st-century friendships.
I don't buy this. Social networking sites giveth as much as they taketh away. Speaking from my own experience, I've found myself becoming closer with some friends and less close with others based on Facebook.
More generally, there seems to be a generational effect whenever a new social technology emerges. Different generations react in radically different ways:
1) The Mature Generation tends to disdain the technology as yet another example of the world going to hell in a handbasket.
2) For the Maturing Generation, the new technology is both a blessing and a curse. The adroit learn how to use the new technology to vault to social, political or economic heights that they would not have otherwise achieved. At the same time, a new technology without new social norms inevitably creates confusion about what is acceptable and what is taboo. Some people lose status as a result.
3) For the Youngest Generation, the technology isn't new by the time they come to use it. They're savvy in the ways that the technology is both an opportunity and a risk, and can navigate those waters without thinking too hard. For this generatioon, the social technology is part of the new normal.
Sorkin has demonstrated his Oldest Generation credentials since the "Lemon-Lyman" episode of The West Wing. Which is fine. But there are other generations out there, and they're not relating to these technologies the way that Sorkin thinks.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Wednesday, April 7, 2010 - 5:47 PM
It is not a shock for readers to learn that I think blogs have been a great innovation for the information ecosystem. That said, I've come across two examples in the past 24 hours where bloggers have really let down the guild -- because they blogged before reading through to the end.
Example #1: Brad DeLong, "Joshua Green Doesn't Get How Government Works.":
Joshua Green:
Yes, Larry Summers is Leaving: Summers cast his eye on the Fed chairmanship and agreed to bide his time until Ben Bernanke's term ended at the NEC--a staff position well below his old job as Clinton's Treasury secretary...
"Below." "Above." Joshua Green is old enough to know that whether the Secretary of the Treasury is "above" or "below" the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy really depends on the people and on the President....
The rule is that with a President who is weak--or uninterested in economic policy--or when the Chairs of House Banking, Senate Banking, Senate Finance, and House Ways-and-Means are strong, then the Treasury Secretary is the more powerful position. But with a President who is strong and interested in economic policy, the Assistant to the President is the higher-ranking job.
This is an old, old story....
Over the generations, face-time with the king is what matters for power. (emphasis added)
DeLong makes a fair point here -- face time can be really important sometimes. The thing is, Green tackled the "face-time" question head-on in his original story about Larry Summers:
As Jonathan Alter lays out in his forthcoming book, "The Promise," Summers maneuvered to sideline people like Paul Volcker, Joe Stiglitz, and even Orszag, behavior more characteristic of the Clinton administration than the Obama administration. Alter also reveals that Obama's nickname for Summers is "Dr. Kevorkian," which does not imply paternal fondness.
But what really makes me believe that Summers won't stick around is that all this Machiavellian intrigue has failed to win him what he wanted most: power. Summers gets plenty of presidential face time, but he's not the nexus of White House activity that everyone expected him to be, and that doesn't sit well according to the Summers associates I spoke with. In my Atlantic piece, I go into considerable detail about how Geithner, and not Summers, came to be the key person on financial matters. But it wasn't just finance. Energy and health care care were also routed elsewhere, to Carol Browner and Nancy Ann DeParle. The hand-holding of anxious lawmakers that became an integral part of the NEC job under Summers's mentor, Bob Rubin, is being handled by another economist, Mark Zandi, a former McCain adviser. Marc points out that Summers does "ride herd over the administration's infrastructure renewal program." But I'd wager that infrastructure renewal is not what Larry Summers pictured for himself when he arrived at the White House. (emphasis added)
Green clearly thinks that face time is important --- it's just that Summers appears to have a limited ability to converty that face-time into actual policy responsibility. DeLong can dispute that assertion -- but he can't assert, as he blogged, that Green is somehow naive about the way Washington works. Based on that paragraph, he seems better clued in than DeLong.
Example #2: Conservative bloggers on this AP story about the Obama administration's provisional changes to the National Security Strategy. The story leads with the following:
President Barack Obama's advisers will remove religious terms such as "Islamic extremism" from the central document outlining the U.S. national security strategy and will use the rewritten document to emphasize that the United States does not view Muslim nations through the lens of terror, counterterrorism officials said.
The change isa significant shift in the National Security Strategy, a document that previously outlined the Bush Doctrine of preventative war and currently states: "The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century."
As you can imagine, there are a fair number of conservative bloggers lashing out at this story. Andy McArthy calls it "willful blindness." Michelle Malkin concludes, "We’ve traded in a reality-based national security strategy for a Birkenstock bumper-sticker fantasy plan."
Fine, except that if you read the whole AP story, you discover that the origins of the "Birkenstock bumper-sticker fantasy plan" are... Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush:
Obama's speechwriters have taken inspiration from an unlikely source: former President Ronald Reagan. Visiting communist China in 1984, Reagan spoke to Fudan University in Shanghai about education, space exploration and scientific research.
He discussed freedom and liberty. He never mentioned communism or democracy.
"They didn't look up to the U.S. because we hated communism," said Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, Obama's foreign policy speechwriter.
Like Reagan in China, Obama in Cairo made only passing references to terrorism. Instead he focused on cooperation....
Obama did not invent Muslim outreach. President George W. Bush gave the White House its first Quran, hosted its first Iftar dinner to celebrate Ramadan, and loudly stated support for Muslim democracies like Turkey....
[Karen]
Hughes and Juan Zarate, Bush's former deputy national security adviser, said Obama's efforts build on groundwork from Bush's second term, when some of the rhetoric softened. But by then, Zarate said, it was overshadowed by the Guantanamo Bay detention center, the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and a prolonged Iraq war.
"In some ways, it didn't matter what the president did or said. People weren't going to be listening to him in the way we wanted them to," Zarate said. "The difference is, President Obama had a fresh start."
I'm not saying that this strategy will work -- but Malkin and McArthy don't seem to realize that they're saying that Reagan and Bush were Birkenstrock-wearers as well.
FP's own Peter Feaver is quoted in the AP story as a skeptic, and I think he makes a fair point. Over at the Corner, Michael Rubin looked at the same story and suggested flaws in the administration's argument. I'm only partially convinced by Rubin's argument -- but it's clear that at least Rubin read the whole AP story before blogging about it.
Seriously, read the whole thing before blogging it.
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - 4:04 AM
As I'm transitioning from vacation mode to catching-up mode, Two brief notes. First, you might notice a blogroll and twitter feed on the right-hand side of the page. Classy, huh?
Second, blogger "fame" can bring some odd moments. For example, Henry Farrell posted that John Holbo "is profiled along with other academic bloggers (DeLong, Drezner, Shalizi) in Berkeley’s alumni magazine."
The piece is primarily about DeLong and Holbo -- here's the section on yours truly:
Other well-known academic bloggers admit they began in an effort to be heard beyond the tight circle of academe to which they had access as untenured professors. Tufts University Professor Dan Drezner, a right-leaning political blogger who often skirmishes online with DeLong, began blogging after 9/11 because he had expertise in the Middle East, and major newspapers refused to publish his op-eds. Within a year, he was a regular contributor to The New York Times. At the time he and DeLong jumped in, says Drezner, blogging was “the quickest way to become a public intellectual."
Now, I don't know if there are so many inaccuracies in this essay because I got my Ph.D. from a rival institution, but let's clear up a few things:
1) I have never claimed area expertise about the Middle East. I'll claim some expertise about the study of international relations, some of which applies to the Middle East. That's a different kettle of fish than what's stated about me in the above paragraph.
2) I've never been a regular contributor to the New York Times, unless four book reviews and one op-ed in seven years counts as "regular."
I suspect that Cathleen McCarthy, who wrote the essay, mistakenly conflated myself and FP's Marc Lynch, from this Williams Alumni Review story she wrote three years ago. But it's good to have a blog to set the facts straight.
Enough navel-gazing. Substantive blogging will resume tomorrow.
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Friday, October 16, 2009 - 4:01 PM
Consider two recent postings on the state of Web 2.0 discourse.
The first, optimistic one comes from Tyler Cowen on the utility of the blogosphere:
Chess players who train with computers are much stronger for it. They test their intuitions and receive rapid feedback as to what works, simply by running their program. People who learn economics through the blogosphere also receive feedback, especially if they sample dialogue across a number of blogs of differing perspectives. The feedback comes from which arguments other people found convincing....
Not many outsiders understand what a powerful learning mechanism the blogosphere has set in place.
Now let's consider FP's own Evgeny Morozov's revulsion response to the twittering about balloon boy yesterday:
The amount of energy that had been exerted by the Twitterati to save the now infamous "balloon boy" would probably be enough to prevent at least a few dozen African genocides. They even started their own campaign with its own hashtag: #savetheballoonboy, which for a while was a trending topic on Twitter. That is, it was a trending topic before it turned out that the boy was hiding in his house and had not had any relationship with that balloon....
[T]his all-pervasive cynicism with which members of the slacktivist generation treat extremely serious social problems is very off-putting and disturbing. What was the reaction to the #ballonboy story after the boy's whereabouts were disclosed? Humor. Some of it the jokes were mildly funny; most of it them were in bad taste. For example, the most popular joke - which also became a trending topic on Twitter - was making fun of Anne Frank, of all people (implying that she had a much better hide-out space in the attic - all phrased to sound as it was coming from Kanye West).
Well, if a tasteless joke about one of the most dramatic symbols of the Holocaust becomes the most popular topic on Twitter, there is something fundamentally wrong with the taste and norms of that community.
So, blogs are better than Twitter, yes? Um, no.
The blogosphere can be a powerful learning mechanism -- but that hardly guarantees that it will be. In this way, the blogosphere -- and the Twitterverse, for that matter -- are simply alternative mediums, like television or radio. The content, or the consumption of that content, can be either good or bad. To use a famous constructivist turn of phrase, the blogosphere is what people make of it.
Tyler Cowen's blogosphere? I want to go to there. But I'm not sure everyone else does. And, just because a lot of people want to go to Morozov's dystopic depiction of the Twitterverse doesn't mean that everyone will.
Blogs have been around for a decade now, and Twitter has been in operation for a few years. Can we dispense with the broad-based characterizations of social systems that are way too variegated for such simple characterizations?
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Monday, September 21, 2009 - 12:55 PM
One of the biggest mistakes traditional academics make is to take all words equally seriously. That is to say, academics who do not write for a non-scholarly audience tend to assume that it takes an equal length of time and effort to compose a journal article, an op-ed, or even a blog post. In reality, it's kind of like circuit training -- each activity exercises a different set of writing muscles (that said, journal articles require way more reps than other forms of writing).
I bring this up because I have now joined Twitter, in a desperate, far-too-late-effort to catch up to my FP colleague Mark Lynch -- who is securely ensconced in the FP Twitterati Top 100. Right now he's crushing me in terms of followers, so I warmly encourage all my readers to start following me on Twitter -- and then feel free to ignore my tweets.
Somewhat more seriously, my Twitter postings will mostly be on matters that are other off-topic for Foreign Policy or things I don't have time to develop into the long, nuanced sentences required for blogging. So, just to clarify for those academics in the audience, here is the official Hierarchy of Drezner Publications -- from highest degree of effort to lowest degree of effort:
- University press books
- Peer-refereed journal articles
- University press book chapters
- Editor-refereed essays
- Non-university press books and chapters
- Op-ed essays
- Commentaries for Marketplace
- Blog posts about Salma Hayek and zombies
- Other, lesser blog posts about trade, finance, etc.
- Twitter tweets/Facebook status updates
- Comments on friend's Facebook pages
- Mutterings under my breath while waiting for airport security
- Things I shout at the television during Red Sox-Yankee games
- Things I say at the bar on the third day of the American Political Science Association annual meeting after I have three vodka tonics in me.
- Things I say at the bar on the third day of the American Political Science Association annual meeting when completely sober.
Also, just an FYI -- usually you can write off a technology the moment I embrace it. So if tech stocks go down today, that's on me.
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - 4:28 PM
Maureen Dowd has a column today entitled "Stung by the Perfect Sting." We're going to run much of this column through a little MoDo translator, partially inspired by Josh Chafetz's still-relevant discussion of the Immutable Laws of Maureen Dowd, and helped by a few other bloggers.
Here we go....
If I read all the vile stuff about me on the Internet, I’d never come to work. I’d scamper off and live my dream of being a cocktail waitress in a militia bar in Wyoming.
If you’re written about in a nasty way, it looms much larger for you than for anyone else. Gossip goes in one ear and out the other unless you’re the subject. Then, nobody’s skin is thick enough.
Translation: "I read everything about me on the Interwebs. Everything. And despite my bravado act, it hurts me sometimes. I'm brave for putting up with it, though. Ah, the first graf and I've already checked off the Fourth Immutable Law of Dowd: 'The particulars of my consumer-driven, self-involved life are of universal interest and reveal universal truths.'
Say, the militia crack was pretty funny, right? Right?"
“The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered,” says Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic. “The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone’s drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes.”
Translation: "You know how, later on in this essay, I say that insulting individuals on the Internet is rude? That's only if you do it badly. If you insult broad swathes of people in a charming manner, that's just witty banter."
Those are my people, I protested, but I knew what he meant. That’s why I was interested in the Case of the Blond Model and the Malicious Blogger.
Translation: "Hah! Less than a third of the way through, and I've already checked off the First Immutable Law of Dowd: 'All political phenomena can be reduced to caricatures of the personalities involved.' Suck on that, Tom Friedman!!"
It began eight months ago when Liskula Cohen, a 37-year-old model and Australian Vogue cover girl, was surprised to find herself winning a “Skankiest in NYC” award from an anonymous blogger. The online tormentor put up noxious commentary on Google’s blogger.com, calling Cohen a “skank,” a “ho” and an “old hag” who “may have been hot 10 years ago.”
Cohen says she’s “a lover, not a fighter.” But the model had stood up for herself before. In 2007, at a New York club, she tried to stop a man named Samir Dervisevic who wanted to drink from the vodka bottle on her table. He hit her in the face with the bottle and gouged a hole “the size of a quarter,” as she put it, requiring plastic surgery.
Translation: "Did you like how I subtly compared the physical attacker to the blogger? That was pretty deft of me, right?"
This time, she punched the virtual bully in the face, filing a defamation suit to force Google to give up the blogger’s e-mail. And she won.
“The words ‘skank,’ ‘skanky’ and ‘ho’ carry a negative implication of sexual promiscuity,” wrote Justice Joan Madden of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, rejecting the Anonymous Blogger’s assertion that blogs are a modern soapbox designed for opinions, rants and invective.
The judge cited a Virginia court decision that the Internet’s “virtually unlimited, inexpensive and almost immediate means of communication” with the masses means “the dangers of its misuse cannot be ignored. The protection of the right to communicate anonymously must be balanced against the need to assure that those persons who choose to abuse the opportunities presented by this medium can be made to answer for such transgressions.”
Cyberbullies, she wrote, cannot hide “behind an illusory shield of purported First Amendment rights.”
Translation: "A judge is on my side! I'm going to quote her at length!"
[Side note here: will individuals also be able to sue those who write anonymously about them on bathroom walls soon?--DD]
The Internet was supposed to be the prolix paradise where there would be no more gatekeepers and everyone would finally have their say. We would express ourselves freely at any level, high or low, with no inhibitions.
Yet in this infinite realm of truth-telling, many want to hide. Who are these people prepared to tell you what they think, but not who they are? What is the mentality that lets them get in our face while wearing a mask? Shredding somebody’s character before the entire world and not being held accountable seems like the perfect sting.
Pseudonyms have a noble history. Revolutionaries in France, founding fathers and Soviet dissidents used them. The great poet Fernando Pessoa used heteronyms to write in different styles and even to review the work composed under his other names.
As Hugo Black wrote in 1960, “It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes.”
But on the Internet, it’s often less about being constructive and more about being cowardly.
Translation: "I bet no one knew about this phenomenon before I discovered it today. God, my insights into this -- some anonymous blogging is good, some bad -- are really stunning."
Dowd conveniently ignores a few important facts. First, there are power disparities going on here. If, say, the New York Times published a story calling Cohen a "skank," I can see the need for a lawsuit. Same thing if the Huffington Post had done it. But who the hell read this post before the lawsuit commanded everyon'es attention? As Laura McKenna puts it:
This just feels like a lot of whining to me. If you're on the opinion page of the New York Times, you have to be able to take the heat. It's part of the game. If you're not up for it, then I've got a waitress job for you.
Second, in Dowd's closing grafs she manages to conflate and tar all anonymous commentary because some act rudely on the Internet. This is the functional equivalent of me saying that because George Will is occasionally shoddy with his fact-checking, the entire op-ed profession is worthless and slanderous. Attacking an entire medium because of what some individuals are doing seems logically incoherent to me -- and yet far too many media commentators do this when talking about the blogosphere.
In my experience, anonymous or not, the quality of one's insights and shrewdness of one's observations are the things that tend to push a blogger up through the ranks.
If only that were still true of New York Times columnists.
UPDATE: For more on the legal intricacies of the motivating case, see this Dan Solove post.
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Monday, July 6, 2009 - 5:57 PM
Laura McKenna has a great post on the current state of the blogosphere. The title to this post sums up (but does not do justice to) her argument. Lots of respones from other "oldie bloggers": Matt Yglesias, Megan McArdle, Kevin Drum, Russell Arben Fox, Adam Kotsko, Ezra Klein, and Tyler Cowen.
The fact that it took me a few days to stumble onto it suggests she's onto something. Some of her key points:
Bloggers have undermined the blogosphere. Bloggers do not link to each other as much as they used to. It's a lot of work to look for good posts elsewhere, and most bloggers have become burnt out. Drezner and Farrell had a theory that even small potato bloggers would have their day in the sun, if they wrote something so great that it garnered the attention of the big guys. But the big guys are too burnt out to find the hidden gems. So, good stuff is being written all the time, and it isn't bubbling to the top.
Many have stopped using blogrolls, which means less love spread around the blogosphere. The politics of who should be on a blogroll was too much of a pain, so bloggers just deleted the whole thing....
In the past, I could easily figure out which blogs had linked to me and then send them a reciprocal link. For whatever reasons, Google Blog and Technorati aren't picking up the smaller blogs, and I have no idea who's linking to me....
So blogging has changed a lot in the past six years. It's still an excellent medium for self-expression and professional networking, but it will no longer make mega-stars. It's actually a good thing that the hoopla has died down. No one should spend that much time in front of a computer. The expectations were unrealistic. Use your blogs to target particular audiences and have a clear mission, and you'll get a following. Blogging should be the means to another goal -- a rough draft for future articles/books, a way to network with professionals, a place to document your life for your children, a way to have fun. Those are very real and good outcomes of blogging and that's why I'm continuing to keep at.
Laura is definitely onto something -- professionalization, partisanship and speciaization have hit the blogosphere pretty hard. The linksearch problem might be abetting this -- like Laura, I have more difficulty now tracing who's linked to my posts than I did a few years ago.
That said, I will defend the "focal point" argument Henry and I made oh so many moons ago. When the unexpected happens in the world, I do think new blogs and new bloggers can emerge rapidly. Think of Simon Johnson's Calculated Risk Baseline Scenario blog in response to the global financial crisis, or Tehran Bureau in response to the Iran election imbroglio.
The difference might be that new bloggers are not exactly neophytes on their subject matter. Johnson was the IMF's chief economist, for example. My fellow bloggers here at Foreign Policy are not exactly novices in the subject matter. So it might be more accurate to say that the days when someone like Matt Yglesias or Kevin Drum could be vaulted into the top tier of bloggers has come to an end.
As to whether this is a good or bad thing, I'm hopelessly compromised here because of my total selling out move to Foreign Policy. I'll let the readers be the judge.
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Tuesday, April 7, 2009 - 4:53 PM
As part of their Great Issues Forum, CUNY's Graduate Center for the Humanities asked me to comment on a blog I'd never read before last month -- the Angry Arab News Service. They asked that blog's author -- As'ad AbuKhalil, a professor of political science at Cal State-Stanislaus and visiting professor at Berkeley. -- to do the same for me.
You can read our contrasting takes over at the Great Issues Forum website. Professor AbuKhalil's best and most devastating sentence:
I followed Drezner’s blog for a few days and it made me wonder: am I that narcissistic and that self-referential?
Hey, with the obvious exception of Alex Rodriguez, no one is as narcissistic and self-referential as I am, OK?!!
Click here to read the whole thing. We agree a lot -- on what we disagree about (this includes paragraph breaks, by the way).
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Monday, December 29, 2008 - 2:49 PM
If you can fake authenticity in the new year, you will have it made. Authenticity was already a buzzword in business and politics before the credit crunch. It will become an essential virtue following the curtain twitch that revealed so many Masters of the Universe to be Wizards of Oz. At one executive leadership seminar I attended recently, the trainer explained that authenticity was the main attribute delegates needed to radiate, including “different types of authenticity for different audiences”. This means being a technocrat in the boardroom, a pragmatist among middle managers and an Average Joe on the shop floor.One does wonder if this increases the likelihood of bloggers -- who were in on the ground floor of this whole "constructed authenticity" deal -- making it in the corporate world.
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Thursday, December 25, 2008 - 2:58 PM
Here are Tufts University Political Science Professor Dan Drezner and Stanford Philosophy Professor Joshua Cohen demonstrating how good-hearted, profoundly reasonable, oh-so-intellectually sophisticated Americans diligently struggle with -- torture themselves over -- what they have convinced themselves is the vexing question of whether our leaders should be considered "war criminals" by virtue of . . . . having committed unambiguous war crimes.... This is now the conventional wisdom, the settled consensus, of our political and media elites with regard to America's torture program. It's perfectly appropriate that Drezner cites and heaps praise on the self-consciously open-minded meditation on the torture question from The Atlantic's Ross Douthat because -- as I wrote in response to Douthat -- our political elites have now, virtually in unison, convinced themselves that ambiguity and understanding with regard to American war crimes are the hallmarks of both intellectual and moral superiority.... This is the justifying argument the political class has latched onto -- one that was spawned, revealingly enough, by Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith: sure, some of this might have been excessive and arguably wrong, but it was all done for the right reasons, by people who are good at heart. So common is this self-justifying American rationalization that it has now even infected the mentality of long-time Bush critics, such as The Los Angeles Times Editorial Page, which today argued that prosecutions for Bush officials are inappropriate, even though they clearly broke multiple laws, because "they did so as part of a post- 9/11 response to terrorism." As this excellent reply from Diane at Cab Drollery puts it: "civility and understanding is far more important to them than simple justice."Yes, because we all know that the exact administration of justice is best when it lacks understanding. This is certainly true of Greenwald, who appears not to have actually listened to what Cohen and I actually said to each other. I was pretty explicit about the following:
- Torture is wrong.
- Douthat's post gets at the mindset of a majority of Americans in the immediate wake of 9/11
- Political leaders are supposed to remember the Constitution and ignore the seductive allures of mob psychology -- and therefore should be held accountable fo these actions
- The Bush administration responded to their pre-9/11 neglect of the terrorist threat by wildly overreacting to possible threats in the post-9/11 era.
- If you're going to go after Bush administration officials for violating the law, Condi Rice should be pretty far down on the list, since she a) was not in the chain of command on this; and b) despite her formal role, was cut out of the loop on a lot of the decision-making.
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Thursday, December 25, 2008 - 2:05 PM
Don't worry if your posts suck a little. Unless you're Jeffrey Goldberg, your first blog post is unlikely to be perfect. Indeed, a lot of your posts aren't going to be as great as they could be if you spent many hours on them—and that's OK. Felix Salmon, who writes Portfolio's excellent finance blog Market Movers, puts it this way: "Quantity is more important than quality. Don't be scared of being wrong, or inelegant; you have much less of an idea what your readers are going to like than you possibly imagine. So jump right in, put yourself out there." Nearly every blogger I spoke to agreed with this sentiment. If you're trying to gain an audience, you can't afford to worry over every sentence as if it were ... see, I was going to spend 15 minutes thinking of a hilarious and deeply insightful simile there, but, damn it, I'm in blogging mode and need to move on.Oh, and also, I signed up for every guide produced by these guys:
I still have some free e-mails.
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Tuesday, December 23, 2008 - 6:04 PM
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Monday, December 22, 2008 - 9:49 PM
Most readers know that the views expressed on Matt’s blog are his own and don’t always reflect the views of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Such is the case with regard to Matt’s comments about Third Way. Our institution has partnered with Third Way on a number of important projects - including a homeland security transition project - and have a great deal of respect for their critical thinking and excellent work product. They are key leaders in the progressive movement and we look forward to working with them in the future.This action has provoked a fair amount of blog reaction/rebuke -- check out William Beutler, Brad DeLong, Belle Waring, Ann Althouse, James Joyner, Brendan Nyhan, Julian Sanchez, and many more -- as well as follow-up posts from Yglesias himself and CAP's Faiz Shakir. Yglesias gets the understatement of the day: "I wish the guest post from Jennifer Palmieri that I put up Sunday evening had been handled differently in a variety of ways since just sticking it on the blog and then going to bed seems to have given people a lot of misleading notions about the site being somehow 'hijacked.'” As near as I can figure it, bloggers are very annoyed at the Center for American Progress, but they're angry for two very different reasons:
- What Palmieri did appears to infringe on Yglesias' independence as a blogger. To quote Nyhan: "There's no way that this sort of reaction won't create a chilling effect on Yglesias. How could he not think twice about criticizing Third Way or other CAP partners in the future?"
- What Palmieri did was politically ham-handed. It would have been much better if she had taken Yglesias aside and leaned on him in a much more quiet but politically effective manner. [Where's Karl Rove when you need him?--ed. Quiet, you.]
The reason an online jab gets elevated like this is that CAP is no longer just a think tank: It's interwoven with the transition, and expected to be close to the Obama White House. The perception that it was hostile to Third Way could have damaged Third Way's ability to raise money, among other things. It's an early sign of how the new Democratic infrastructure faces a new set of challenges with Democrats controlling the government.Glenn Reynolds has a point here: "Sorry, if you can’t stand what bloggers blog, don’t pretend you’re cool enough to hire bloggers." Or, if you allow "clarifications" on posts that deviate from your parent institutions' views, don't pretend that you're a cool blogger any more. UPDATE: I see that Palmieri is being considered for assistant secretary of defense for public affairs. While Palmieri is getting a little too much blame for an act that Yglesias was complicit in, I have to think that this whole brouhaha is not a point in her favor. For sheer theater value, however, I would love for this to come up in a confirmation hearing: "Ms. Palmieri, I'd like to bring up the CAPping incident with Mr. Yglesias...." ANOTHER UPDATE: Uh-oh... it's spreading.
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Sunday, November 23, 2008 - 3:12 PM
The top tier of public intellectuals has come to speak mainly through upmarket news media such as the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, the New York Review of Books and the BBC. But the rise of blogs has greatly enlarged and confused the market. A disparager would say that anybody can be a blogger, and anything can be a blog: is this not proof of low standards? And yet, top bloggers include academics and commentators whose work would qualify them as public intellectuals by any traditional measure—for example, Tyler Cowen, Daniel Drezner, James Fallows, Steven Levitt, Lawrence Lessig and Andrew Sullivan. Indeed, it seems fair to say that if you have the quick wit and the pithy turn of phrase traditionally needed to succeed as a public intellectual, then you are one of nature’s bloggers. If you cannot quite imagine Berlin posting to Twitter, then think how well he would put, say, Hannah Arendt in her place, on bloggingheads.tv.... Whatever their provenance, the public intellectuals of 2009 will want to be fluent in the obvious issues of the moment: environment and energy, market turmoil, China, Russia, Islam. On that basis it looks like another good year for established stars such as Thomas Friedman, Martin Wolf, Bjorn Lomborg and Minxin Pei. But a rising generation of bloggers is terrifyingly young and bright: expect to hear more from Ezra Klein, Megan McArdle, Will Wilkinson and Matthew Yglesias.Of course, the really funny thing about this is that Klein, McArdle, Wilkinson and Yglesias all dwarf my traffic flows.
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Tuesday, November 18, 2008 - 7:05 PM
It’s not just that he was fundamentally wrong at least every other week throughout the year (misattributing a quote in his first column, counting Clinton out after Iowa, placing Obama at a Jeremiah Wright sermon that Obama didn’t attend, predicting the imminent return of a McCain adviser named Mike Murphy who ended up staying off the campaign, all but predicting a McCain victory, sort of predicting that McCain would oppose the bailout, praising McCain’s “suspension” of his campaign as a smart move, preferring fake populism to professional excellence and Joe the Plumber to Horace the Poet, urging Ayers-Wright attack tactics as the way for McCain to win, basically telling McCain to ignore all the advice Kristol had given him throughout the year, but above all, vouching again and again and again, privately and publicly, for Palin as an excellent Vice-Presidential choice). What the hell—it was an unpredictable year. The real grounds for firing Kristol are that he didn’t take his column seriously. In his year on the Op-Ed page, not one memorable sentence, not one provocative thought, not one valuable piece of information appeared under his name. The prose was so limp (“Who, inquiring minds want to know, is going to spare us a first Obama term?”) that you had the sense Kristol wrote his column during the commercial breaks of his gig on Fox News Sunday and gave it about the same amount of thought.Ouch. Harsh but true. I'll go out on a small limb and say that if Kristol gets his contract renewed, then it falsifies my hypothesis pretty well. [And if he doesn't get renewed?--ed. Then it's only weak confirmation. There are other reasons why Kristol would be let go beyond blog criticism -- the election suggests that demand for conservative viewpoints has lessened.] Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan UPDATE: Kristol himself sounds ambivalent about the gig: "It's been fun. It's a lot of work. I have a lot of things going on."
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Thursday, November 13, 2008 - 3:58 PM
That's cute, but here's what's truly odd about Palin's complaint about bloggers -- they helped to make her. Let's revisit that Jane Mayer essay on Palin from The New Yorker, shall we?:
During her gubernatorial campaign, Bitney said, he began predicting to Palin that she would make the short list of Republican Vice-Presidential prospects. “She had the biography, I told her, to be a contender,” he recalled. At first, Palin only laughed. But within a few months of being sworn in she and others in her circle noticed that a blogger named Adam Brickley had started a movement to draft her as Vice-President... [Adam] Brickley registered a Web site—palinforvp.blogspot.com—which began getting attention in the conservative blogosphere. In the month before Palin was picked by McCain, Brickley said, his Web site was receiving about three thousand hits a day. Support for Palin had spread from one right-of-center Internet site to the next. First, the popular conservative blogger InstaPundit mentioned Brickley’s campaign. Then a site called the American Scene said that Palin was “very appealing”; another, Stop the A.C.L.U., described her as “a great choice.” The traditional conservative media soon got in on the act: The American Spectator embraced Palin, and Rush Limbaugh, the radio host, praised her as “a babe.”
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Thursday, November 13, 2008 - 5:11 AM
A seven-page questionnaire being sent by the office of President-elect Barack Obama to those seeking cabinet and other high-ranking posts may be the most extensive — some say invasive — application ever. The questionnaire includes 63 requests for personal and professional records, some covering applicants’ spouses and grown children as well, that are forcing job-seekers to rummage from basements to attics, in shoe boxes, diaries and computer archives to document both their achievements and missteps.Here's a link to the actual questionnaire. I think Question 10 would do me in:
Writings: Please list and, if readily available, provide a copy of each book, article, column, or publication (including but not limited to any posts or comments on blogs or other websites) you have authored, individually or with others. Please list all aliases or "handles" you have used to communicate on the Internet.This rules me out -- but I really pity the poor RA at Harvard tasked to answer this question for Cass Sunstein.
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Tuesday, November 11, 2008 - 2:57 PM
Disquisitions about public intellectuals usually conclude that they ain't what they used to be. Subtitles from recent books on the topic include A Study of Decline and An Endangered Species? Indeed, the major point of debate is dating the precise start of the decline and fall. For some critics, Götterdämmerung started in the 1950s; for others, the 1930s. More-curmudgeonly writers place the date earlier, stretching back to the heyday of John Stuart Mill or even the death of Socrates.Go check it out.
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Wednesday, October 29, 2008 - 5:59 PM
"It's so built into my system, that it's going to be hard to stop," says Politico's Ben Smith. Smith, who started blogging about New York politics in 2005, is now seriously addicted to the pace and metabolism--a word many invoked to describe the election's rhythms--of the blogger's life. He finds himself especially energized by the intensity of his readers who, by 4 a.m. have posted dozens of comments to a 3 a.m. post and who are now some of Smith's best sources, sending him scoops and stories and snapshots of a far-roaming campaign. His family, however, is eagerly looking forward to November 5th. Smith's wife repeatedly threatens to flush his Blackberry down the toilet; his kids, jealous of his "running conversation" with his readers, regularly squirrel away the device in the off chance they find it unattended. But Smith can't bring himself to stop. Recently, he returned at 2 a.m. from a fishing trip and "couldn't not plug in after being off the grid for an entire day." He stayed up blogging and answering emails until 6 a.m.
"It's really pathological," he conceded.
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Wednesday, October 1, 2008 - 4:46 PM
It looks like Congress is seriously considering an increase in FDIC limits from $100,000 to $250,000. Contrary to my post yesterday, this looks like a good idea, particularly in that it will help small businesses holding a lot of short-term cash. Why the change of heart? Commenters, my friend. I don't blog often, so maybe this is an everyday phenomenon, but instead of harsh blowback I received about a dozen intelligent, thoughtful explanations for why this is, in fact, a good idea. I won't re-hash them; read them yourself. I stand corrected, and appreciative.I bring this up because it's so unusual. An occupational hazard of blogging is that it promotes excessive certainty, and these are really uncertain times. I think I know something about what's going on in financial markets right now, but I sure as hell don't know everything. I'm 85% certain that some kind of financial rescue package is necessary to prevent a complete meltdown of the credit markets -- but that leaves 15% of me gnawing on the possibility that I'm wrong. So if I see new information that persuades me that I'm wrong, I'll be happy to say I've changed my mind. And anyone blogging about this should be prepared to do so as well.
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Sunday, September 21, 2008 - 2:05 PM
- My fastball ain't what it used to be. Compared to other bloggers I read, I'm not keeping up the pace and depth of my blog posts (sorry about that --fewer free lunches for you!). This is for a lot of reasons. First, a lot of top bloggers are professionals -- i.e., they are paid to blog. It's just really, really tough to compete as a generalist when the division of labor kicks in.* Second, I have a lot more day job responsibilities than I did in the past, and I'm very comfortable with putting the blog at the bottom of the list. Third, my children are walking and talking now, which makes them more interesting (and time-consuming). And fourth....
- I've screwed up a lot. There are some big, big issues that I've gotten wrong in my blogging. I supported the invasion of Iraq and that hasn't gone so well. I opposed a surge in Iraq and that has turned out better than I thought. I've gotten a lot of stuff right too, but in my mind the screw-ups are what stand out. On the other hand, this has been good, because....
- I'm a bit better at avoiding some blog traps. Blogs call for instant analysis, but after six years at this I'm concluding that there are times when it's a virtue to not expressing an immediate opinion. For example, I'm very glad I was too busy to post about the Russian-Georgian conflict when it first broke out. Why? Because the immediate blog debate was over who was to blame for the conflict, which was not terribly interesting. I thought it distracted many from the "what happens now?" questions that are much more salient. Posting too early can also cause a blogger to lock in their opinions before enough information is on the table (this, by the way, is why I'm holding off on blogging about the bailout -- I need more information).
- The blog has been a godsend to my day job. I've chronicled why here, but the basic point is that all aspects of my job have been facilitated by maintaining this site.
- Thanks for the comments! For six months the comments feature on this blog was broken. I quite enjoyed that for the first few weeks -- much less energy devoted to dealing with trolls and spam. Since the new software has been installed, however, I've been enjoying and learning from the downthread discussions. So thank you, dear readers, for stopping by -- and for coming back.
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Tuesday, September 16, 2008 - 8:34 PM
I was at a reception the other day and was graciously introduced by a famous senior sociologist to a visiting senior sociologist as an “[insert some very kind words] scholar who studies the social aspects of Internet use”. The visitor laughed. No one else laughed though so quickly, smile wiped from his face, he said: “oh, you’re serious.”In poli sci, the arc of reaction to studying blogs moved very quickly from, "tee hee, you're taking this seriously," to "you might be onto something by looking into blogs" to "gee, your blog essay seems to get cited a lot" was pretty quick, actually -- at least by academic standards.
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Monday, July 28, 2008 - 4:16 AM
[S]pending a lot of time on the internet, as I have since 2002, has rubbed my nose in something that hadn't really bothered me before then: namely just how overwritten so many books and magazine articles are. Seymour Hersh? He's great. You could also cut every one of his pieces by at least 50% and lose exactly nothing. And I'm not picking on Hersh. At a guess, I'd say that two-thirds of the magazine pieces I read could be sliced by nearly a third or more without losing much. That's true of a lot of books too. So: crisper writing, please! One of the upsides of blogging (and the internet in general) is that it allows information to find its natural length: if something only needs a couple of paragraph, that's what it gets. If it needs 10,000 words, it gets that. But there's no need to pad because "we do long form journalism around here," just as there's no need to slash because you only have space for 40 column inches this week. Worriers take note.A few brief thoughts. First, savor the irony here, since Drum's bloggish complaint isn't really be targeted at writers so much as editors. It's the latter's job to make sure a piece reads crisply and cleanly. With some magazines, a tension exists since writers are literally paid by the word. With other magazines, a tension exists because the writer will jealously guard his or her words. And, finally, with other magazines, editors just screw up from time to time. Regardless, it's amusing for a blogger to demand better editing of other writers. Not that Drum's wrong, mind you, but it's just a little strange. In the interest of fairness, perhaps bloggers could set up their own "editing fund" to help pare down Glenn Greenwald or (retroactively) Stephen Den Beste. Second, one mild dissent. In my experience, lengthier essays do not work as well on the web as they do in print. Maybe, like Kevin, it's because of my upbringing reading books and such, but I find there's a limit to how much text I will scan on one page on a computer screen. Scrolling down is not as satisfying as turning a page. I read lengthy online essays the old-fashioned way -- I burn through my toner cartridge and print that sucker. I'm curious if this is simply a failing of mine or if younger Internet-addicted folk feel the same way.
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Friday, February 29, 2008 - 4:03 PM
In his essay, Frum suggests that bloggers are ?pretty much the opposite? of the foreign-policy community, which ?insists upon formal credentials, either academic or bureaucratic.? It is puzzling, then, that the first four bloggers quoted in Frum?s essay possess the very credentials that the foreign-policy community extols. Duncan ?Atrios? Black holds a PhD in economics from an Ivy League institution. Matthew Yglesias is a Harvard graduate writing for the Atlantic. Steven Clemons is the director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. Glenn Greenwald is a Salon columnist and a partner in a DC law firm. Pajama-wearing stereotypes to the contrary, most influential bloggers possess the elite credentials necessary to crack the foreign-policy community.Read he whole thing -- Megan McArdle has a response letter as well. Publicly defending the credentials of Atrios, Matt Yglesias, Glenn Greenwald and Steve Clemons leaves me in a grumpy mood, so blogging will be light for the rest of the day.
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Wednesday, December 19, 2007 - 4:16 PM
My name is David Frum, and I am a blogger. Every day I post some hundreds of words of commentary at the National Review website?often (to fulfill the clich?) while still wearing my pajamas. But I am also a proud, suit-wearing member of the foreign-policy community, with my very own office in a think tank to prove it. There is no avoiding the sad truth that my two communities despise each other. The foreign-policy community (henceforward, ?FPC?) values moderation of views and modulation of tone. It insists upon formal credentials, either academic or bureaucratic (ideally both). It respects seniority, defers to office, mistrusts overt self-promotion and is easily offended by discourtesy. As for the bloggers?well, they?re pretty much the opposite, aren?t they?You can imagine the response this is going to generate. I'll have more to say about this later, but for now I'd make two points. First, if the netroots can get past their own spittle, they will see the grace note Frum closes his essay with:
[T]he spread of education and the improvement of communications have raised the level of debate. The populist protesters of 2007 are far more informed and far more sophisticated than their predecessors of 1973, who were in turn a major improvement over those of 1950, 1935 and 1920. And the foreign-policy community that guided U.S. foreign affairs in the 1990s was a much larger and more diverse group than the corresponding elites that wielded power in the quiet days of the 1950s, who were in turn a less cloistered club than that of the 1920s. It is, as was famously predicted by Yeats, a widening gyre. And it can safely be predicted that when today?s controversies simmer down, and the blogging energy turns to health care or climate change or issues as yet unforeseen, the ?foreign-policy community? that reassumes its former ascendancy will likewise be an expanded and enlarged community. The expertise and sophistication of the FPC at its best will always be needed by a country whose natural tendencies are inward-looking and isolationist. And that expertise and sophistication can only be enhanced when today?s FPC is reinforced, as surely it will be, by young people who gained their first introduction to foreign affairs when they were inspired by 9/11 to join the military or enter academia or learn a foreign language?or (why not?) start a blog.Second, contra Frum's essay, there's really a three-way debate going on, between netroots activists, neoconservatives, and foreign policy experts -- and part of the debate is whether the latter two groups are really fused into one. More on this later. For now, comment away! UPDATE: On the other hand, it's not like progressives aren't capable of netroot criticism. Consider this statement from a press release I was sent:
"In this age of blogs, bumper stickers, and soundbites, we made a bet that there was still a need and place for the kind of deep, considered thinking about serious issues that our journal has produced, " said Andrei Cherny, co-editor and co-founder of Democracy. "This award shows that a DailyKos may have its place, but a quarterly journal of ideas can make a real impact in the 21st century."
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Wednesday, November 7, 2007 - 12:20 AM
Daniel W. Drezner is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
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