Why Blogs?
And by that I mean: “why read blogs?” “Why write a blog?” “How to choose what blogs to read?” And so on.
I’ve been thinking about writing a blog for a very long time, but I’ve never pulled the trigger until now, mainly because there are already so many blogs out there. “The Conversation”—whatever that is—is already chock full of pundits, experts, journalists, and grad student bloggers on every conceivable subject. How could I possibly add something uniquely valuable to that conversation? So I spent a lot of time brainstorming particular blog architectures & topic areas that would help my blog fill some special niche. Otherwise, I’d just be adding noise to an already noisy & overwhelming space.
However, my model of blogging has changed a bit since then. My naïve view was that blogs (along with other forms of general-public-oriented publishing) basically serve the same purpose as research papers, but for a different audience: you’re trying to contribute to a particular “literature,” which is best thought of as a continually improving map for some particular intellectual territory. If this is the analogy you’re using, then it’s not worth writing a blog post if a post on the same topic has already been written. You need to explore new territory, discover a landmark, or draw more granular topography to contribute to the conversation.
Recently, though, I’ve been thinking that articles for the public don’t really serve that kind of purpose at all. Unlike in research, nobody’s going back and surveying all the blogs, magazine articles, and social media posts on a “particular topic.” The public discourse doesn’t have a state-of-the-art, and it isn’t a process which ends in consensus.
The fact that all public information is hypothetically accessible to anyone with an internet connection makes it feel like all the writing in the world is a single project, and you only need one writer for each niche, but The Conversation doesn’t work like that. I think bloggers are less like cartographers and more like—for lack of a better analogy—decomposers. There’s all this organic material in one big heap, and it’s our job to continually digest it and crap it out (or something, I don’t know how biology works). In so doing, we’re breaking down objects which are no longer useful, enriching the soil, and making nutrients accessible for new life. If there is too small or homogenous a population of decomposers, the soil will become stale and turn into mere dirt. Dead concepts will merely lay there unused, and intellectual seeds won’t be able to take root.
So this blog is my attempt to play the role of a free-living nematode. I’ll read lots of things which I find interesting, and try to write clearly about the ones which other people might find useful. But there’s no guarantee that these topics aren’t better-covered elsewhere or that the bio-matter you find laying around here is 100% fresh.
There’s a lot of cognition out there, and nobody can understand all of it. Hopefully, though, all of this reading, thinking, and writing will make the intellectual soil a little richer.