the blogosphere

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? 

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: 

1. University press books
2. Peer-refereed journal articles
3. University press book chapters
4. Editor-refereed essays
5. Non-university press books and chapters
6. Op-ed essays
7. Commentaries for Marketplace
8. Blog posts about Salma Hayek and zombies
9. Other, lesser blog posts about trade, finance, etc.
10. Twitter tweets/Facebook status updates
11. Comments on friend's Facebook pages
12. Mutterings under my breath while waiting for airport security
13. Things I shout at the television during Red Sox-Yankee games
14. 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.
15. 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. 

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. 

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.

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). 

That line from The Simpsons came to my mind when I read this Financial Times essay by Jonathan Guthrie: 

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. 

A reader tipped me off to this Glenn Greenwald post reacting to my bloggingheads diavlog with Joshua Cohen: 

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:

1. Torture is wrong.
2. Douthat's post gets at the mindset of a majority of Americans in the immediate wake of 9/11
3. 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
4. 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.
5. 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. 

I suspect Greenwald didn't comprehend these points in the diavlog because I failed to say "torture is wrong" fifty more times.  Based on my prior experiences with him, he's the kind of guy who needs a lot of repetition in order to comprehend what he's reading.  [Um, does Greenwald actually waterboard puppies?--ed.  In all dealings with Greenwald from here on in, I shall rely on the Greenwald Standard of Blog Proof -- which is to say, if he disagrees with me even one iota, he is hereby evil and can be accused of anything.] 

As your humble blogger sells his soul for institutional prestige and filthy lucre, no doubt some of you are thinking, "Hey, Drezner's leaving a niche for the independent foreign-affairs-minded blogger with a healthy fixation on Salma Hayek."  And you would be right.  So for those of you interested in breaking into the world of independent blogging, Farhad Manjoo has an excellent column up at Slate offering some useful advice, based on his queries of successful bloggers.  I think his second point is his best one: 

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.