Blogwars

I’ve been following the whole Kos-Jerome-TNR debacle, but haven’t commented on it for a couple of reasons, the primary one being that I just can’t be arsed (I’m not a member of Advertise Liberally; I’m not a member of the Townhouse private email list for progressive bloggers; and I’ve never been asked to join either, so it doesn’t directly affect me), followed closely by not feeling as though it would benefit the community around here in any way, but has the potential to divide it by implicitly compelling people to take sides. So big wev.

But within the virtual reams of commentary on the subject, I’ve read two things that I wanted to mention.

TNR’s Lee Siegel asserts that the blogosphere is “hard fascism with a Microsoft face,” and explains:

Even beyond the thuggishness, what I despise about so many blogurus, is the frivolity of their "readers." DailyKos might have hundreds of responses to his posts, but after five or six of them the interminable thread meanders into trivial subjects that have nothing to do with the subject that briefly provoked it. The blogosphere's lack of concentration is even more dangerous than all its rage. In the Middle East, they struggle with belief. In the United States, we struggle with attention. The blogosphere's fanaticism is, in many ways, the triumph of a lack of focus.

Meanwhile, Garance Franke-Ruta at Tapped quotes Chris Bowers, answering a question about whether blogs served as models for offline communities:

I would say no. [audience laughter] That would be a very dark and disturbing place....where someone jumps into a room and says something that makes everyone mad, and then a mob starts chasing them...I can't imagine a community structured like the blogosphere. That would be really scary.

Not to get all Carrie Bradshaw about it, but both of these categorizations of the blogosphere got me thinking about the community here at Shakespeare’s Sister—and neither of them seem to describe us very accurately. (Less traffic has its benefits.) Even and especially when threads get very long—and they’re never “dKos” long, but they get into the triple digits on occasions—the participants retain focus, and probably not out of some particular diligence to avoid thread drift, but because the conversations are interesting, and we like talking to one another.

For the most part, we’re very respectful of one another, too—even when we disagree, which we do fairly regularly. It’s inevitable; we are female and male, straight and gay and trans, black and white and brown and red and kinda peachy, old and young and somewhere in the middle, religious and not, American and not, feminist and not, former Republicans, Democrats, former Democrats, Greens, and Haikuist. A vision of our community translated into the real world doesn’t seem like a dark and disturbing place to me—it seems like a really excellent house party that I’d love to attend.

And for that, I just wanted to say thank you. I quite like this juke joint, and the people who make it hop every day.