"Even on a site with the brainpower of Crooked Timber, what happens more often than not—indeed, what happens so often that I've taken the site from my rss reader and only check it once or twice a month—is the conversion of really good scholars into really lousy journalists."

From an academic perspective, lets just keep blogging in perspective, no one (that I know of) is arguing that it somehow replaces rigorous peer-reviewed research, nor do the CT folks or academics want to become journalists(!), but I don't think there is any question blogging is becoming an important new medium for disseminating ideas (admittedly in rough form at times) and providing an interactive forum for dialogue and interaction (I think the dialogue is much better than Alan Jacobs cares to admit). Take Crooked Timber - I am guessing that the link between the real world and academia is narrowing given these types of blogging efforts (see most recent posts highlighting interesting sociology research). I even believe that research will get better as a result. Sure, there are meanderings into soccer (most recently), academic commiseration etc etc- though on the whole I think blogging is here to stay and will be far more than just a news outlet

I just wrote Prof. Jacobs (no comments section on the article) to point out Teresa Nielsen Hayden's words of wisdom on virtual conversations.

The most important one:

"1. There can be no ongoing discourse without some degree of moderation, if only to kill off the hardcore trolls. It takes rather more moderation than that to create a complex, nuanced, civil discourse. If you want that to happen, you have to give of yourself. Providing the space but not tending the conversation is like expecting that your front yard will automatically turn itself into a garden."

We are all greatly indebted to mister Seigel for reminding us that shabby, bathos-filled reasoning is not limited to text rendered by electrons.

I find myself agreeing with this Jonah Goldberg column, his point being that blogs -- well, the activist ones, at any rate -- represent a return to partisanship that will probably, in the end, benefit us all.

American newspapers were never as unapologetically and uniformly partisan as European ones were (and still are), but they were still mostly creatures of specific political biases. There were Republican and Democratic newspapers, populist and communist newspapers, union and anti-union newspapers. These publications served as vehicles for partisan education and crusading personalities, in much the same way leading blogs do today.

Take another look at the most flagrantly partisan websites today: the liberal Daily Kos and its conservative doppelganger, Red State. What you see are media outlets trying to serve the same function as newspapers in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Of course, I wonder where the Daniel Drezners, the Valves or the Crooked Timbers would fit in in this partisan scheme.

Michael Shermer in his Skeptic column at Scientific American for July has an interesting piece on brain imaging while the subjects analyze politicians that is relevant. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=13&articleID=000CE155-1061-1493-906183414B7F0162
Wonder what they'd see if they ran the experiment on bloggers/commenters?

Cause they don't like 'em? Seems a no-brainer to me. If the big A-list blogs make it through the 2006 election cycle intact and start ramping up for 2008 they will essentially put the big-name traditional-media pundits out of business. I don't think they like that ;-)

Cranky

Let me speak up for Jacobs, on two points.

First, the structure or architecture of comment sections of blogs using common platforms like Movable Type does tend to encourage lower-quality posters and discourage the better ones. This is because discussions are archived, and accessible only by accessing the original main post. Commenters' posts are accessible only in this way, so individual posters have no way to build a record they and others can use as a reference. People just looking to vent or score debating points would have no need for a MBTU feature, but it is a nice thing to offer people who put time and effort into a thoughtful post only to see it disappear into the depths of the blog within a couple of days.

Slate, of course, does have MBTU in its Fray (actually, as more than one person has observed, Slate's platform is better suited to support weblogs than it is to the "TNR-lite" format Mike Kinsley and Jacob Weisberg have insisted on). That didn't keep the Fray from deteriorating badly beginning several years ago, victim of the same problem most blogs have. Blog proprietors do a lousy job of moderating comment sections. They don't like deleting posts or banning posters; they think researching and writing posts is quite enough work; some of the best ones --Kevin Drum is an example -- barely even read their comment sections anymore.

No question moderating comment sections is a thankless job (and unlike Slate, few bloggers can afford to pay someone to do it for them). But the quality of the discussion in loosely moderated, let alone unmoderated comment sections will always deteriorate sooner or later, as low quality posts that require little thought or time to write swamp higher quality material from posters who eventually decide the whole thing is not worth the bother.

A while back there was a comment thread on this site about American public diplomacy and the US's image in the world. I had just seen Dan on TVO out of Toronto and decided to check out his site.

in comments the point was made that the Bush's Administration's habit of threatening to punish countries, like Canada, who declined to support the invasion of Iraq wasn't doing the US's international reputation any good. Regardless of the justness of invading Iraq, or whether the US was getting a fair shake or not, the Bush Administration had managed to construct an almost totally negative image of itself for the outside world.

For writing this the commentator was shouted down. Sort of the same way, I thought, the Bush Administration dealt with criticism.

Fair enough.

Though it hardly seems the comment threads on this site were then able to accept criticism.

Just a quick correction - Jacobs' article is in "Books and Culture", not CT (though CT does publish B&C).

The real discussions happen not in the comments, but between two bloggers.

Bloggers tend to form cliques. Billmon reads Kos, Kos reads Billmon. Just as a circle of friends might ostracise a troll, blogger-cliques do the same by simply not reading troll blogs. So the same sort of "moderated" discussions take place in this blogger-to-blogger medium as might take place between friends in a living room. In this blogger-to-blogger medium, it is indeed possible to have very deep, substantive conversations on very subtle topics.

To join into such a conversation, though, you have to earn enough respect to be able to get some other blogger to read your blog. That's a good thing.

Allow me to bash television as a medium.

It lulls the brain, lowers analytical ability, creates a false sense of intimacy with people and characters who appear on it, elevates the visual over everything else, fills up vast amounts of time if you're not careful, and chooses newscasters who are pretty and winsome rather than knowledgeable.

I used to watch a lot. Now I watch none. I, for one, am better off with print, the web and the radio.

I've never understood the focus on comments pages and their associated vitriol as a the be-all and end-all of blogging. Over and over, I see some pundit take a look at blogs, note that, gee, those comment threads sure get nasty, and conclude that rational discourse is beyond the reach of blogs. And sure, that's one place a conversation can take place in blogging, but to my mind it's hardly the only, the best, or the most important form of blog conversation. Are these writers just not getting the fact that blogging's conversation and idea-bouncing is really mostly going on *between bloggers,* in posts responsive to each other, where, in my experience, the level of civility from the bloggers I follow is actually quite high? That comments can perhaps provide some marginal increase in the overall pool of thought, but that the critical thing that sets blogging apart isn't how easy it is to get involved in a comment thread (and subsequent comment war), but how easy it is to write or read a blog from anywhere, for little or no cost?

I'll bash TV. It is hypnotic and passive. The Czechs have the best slang for it: casozrout, the 'time-chewer.'

NK, in my experience all the truest, wisest, and most eloquent things I've ever read on blog sites have been posted in the comment threads, except for a few weeks last year and once a couple of months ago when Pejman Yousefzadeh went on vacation.