Blog Posts: Conversation or Publication?
posted by Daniel Solove
Blog posts exist in an uneasy position between permanent publications and more informal discussion. How ought they to be viewed when assessing a person’s reputation as a thinker and writer?
This question was inspired by a recent discussion about the propriety of deleting blog posts one strongly regrets posting. Christine Hurt (law, Marquette) at Conglomerate wrote:
[B]loggers are not just diary-keepers in pj’s but contributors to a national dialogue. Of course, journalists seek to be skeptical of this notion, and I think that suspicion is warranted if bloggers live by different rules, including the rule that any post can be deleted if the poster has a change of heart. When a television journalist says something on television, those words are recorded forever. When someone writes an op-ed for the NYT, then once the paper is printed, the op-ed is there forever.
What exactly are blog posts? Publications such as op-eds? Or just talk in an ongoing conversation? Or something of both? This issue is important because it will affect how blog posts come to be used in evaluating the blogger as a thinker and writer. That’s because we have very different standards in evaluating what people say in publications and what people say in conversations.
On the one hand, blogging is a form of permanent publication, just in pixels rather than in print. When I hit the key to “publish” a blog post, I think hard about this choice — much more than I do when I say something in a conversation or in an email. I write my posts with the knowledge that they have a permanence and that they reflect on my reputation. In this way, they resemble a publication.
On the other hand, blogging is very conversational. Posts are dashed off quickly, often without extensive editing. The process of posting isn’t quite as fast as mind to mouth, but it is much faster than the normal publication process. Debates I may have had with people in person, over the phone, or via email are now taking place in the blogosphere. By blogging, I’m merely moving these discussions to a different form of media, one with more permanence and one that extends beyond my inner circle of friends and acquaintences. Maybe blogging should be viewed as akin to a written conversation, but with a larger audience.
Generally, we evaluate people differently depending upon whether they say something in conversation or in print. We’re much more forgiving when it comes to things said in conversation. When something is said in print, we often hold it to a much higher standard. That’s because print can be edited; and we have a norm for making sure we are careful about what we say in print.
I can’t quite resolve how blogging should be treated. It is a new kind of fusion between conversation and publication, and the standards for how to assess a person’s blogging in evaluating his or her intellectual reptutation remain very under-developed.
How should we view blogging?
Related Posts:
1. Solove, Editing the Blogosphere
2. Solove, Why Blogging Is Good
November 1, 2005 at 12:06 am
Posted in: Blogging
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Responses (3)
John Armstrong - November 1, 2005 at 12:18 am
As I mentioned in passing in my latest comment on Editing the Blogosphere, I believe it’s essential to treat new media as new things and not simply try to shoehorn them into one analogy or another. It seems that you agree that blogs are neither publication nor conversation, but hold similarities with both.
I think that blogs run the gamut between the two ends, and no one answer can suffice. I read (and respond to) posts more formally here than I would to the average post on someone’s LiveJournal site, but more freely and conversationally than I would in a letter to the hypothetical editor. There’s room for both styles, even within the same blog.
Unfortunately, this very variance makes the question all the more difficult, and difficult questions in their early, amorphous stages like this I tend to find are better discussed at Koffee? or over a pint or three at Anna Liffey’s than at the sporadic pace of a comment thread.
Side question: does the lifestyle of a legal academic allow for the freewheeling cafe/salon discussions that other academics enjoy?
Adam - November 1, 2005 at 9:16 am
I’m with John that its a new thing. It’s pretty clear that TSA toys or pink bunnies aren’t in the same class as real analysis, but that we mix them in because we crave more readers its fun.
What if there were an easy way to mark articles as “This is new thinking that’s worthy of professional notice?”
Perhaps it would be worth having a journal comprised of blog posts? Or a meta-journal. It would be pretty easy to set up such a thing using Del.icio.us.
atopian.org - January 11, 2006 at 5:08 am
Blogging and academia
Ironic, that the day after I write what is probably the most mindless comment yet on this site, Crooked Timber brings up the subject of academic blogging once more.
continues below the fold..
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