Blogging

A Rather Nasty, Truculent, Aggressive Edge

The Q&A of the day comes from Isaac Chotiner’s interview of Ian McEwan in the New Republic:

Chotiner: Do you read any online reviews?

McEwan: I don’t read the blogs much. I don’t like the tone-the rather in-your-face road-rage quality of a lot of exchange on the Internet. I don’t like the threads that come out of any given piece of journalism. It seems that when people know they can’t be held accountable, when they don’t have eye contact, it seems to bring out a rather nasty, truculent, aggressive edge that I think slightly doesn’t belong in the world of book reviewing.

This is true of much more than online book reviewing, of course.

(Link via, again, PrufrockTwo.)

Why Bloggers Blog

In an excellent interview, Tyler Cowen is asked about blogging:

Knowlege@Wharton: You are a writer and co-founder of the popular economics blog MarginalRevolution.com. How does your inner economist explain blogging? What is the incentive for people like yourself to offer high-quality goods and services online for free? 

Tyler Cowen: Blogging is fun. I’ve made friends through blogging, but most of all I have learned a lot. I think it has made me a better economist. I would also say it’s helped me to discover my inner economist. Because when you are blogging for real people, they don’t want techno babble. They don’t want jargon. They’re like, “What can you tell me that I actually care about?” Most of the ideas in this book, in one way or another, came out of blogging.

Knowlege@Wharton: So we can be motivated to do a lot of work, even highly skilled work, just because it’s fun?

Cowen: Absolutely. A lot of science works on the same basis. It’s true that scientists get paid, but typically they don’t get paid more, or much more, for discovering something that will make them famous. They do it because they love science, or because they want the recognition or because they just stumble upon it. Einstein was never a wealthy man but he worked very hard. So blogging is a new form of an old idea: that people do great things for free. Adam Smith didn’t get paid much for writing Wealth of Nations, even though it’s a long book that required a lot of work. He had an inner drive to get his ideas out there.

I’ve often been asked, and have often asked myself, why I blog. I spend more time on it than any other productive activity, and make only a small fraction of an anyway-insignificant income from it. The above excerpt answers the question rather well.

India Uncut = Junior High School

A number of readers over the last couple of weeks have drawn my attention to The Blog Readability Test, which claims to measure the level of education required to understand a blog. I’m delighted to announce that India Uncut can be understood by anyone who has gone to junior high school. I’ve always aimed to keep it simple, and to avoid jargon and obfuscatory words like ‘obfuscatory’. I’m glad that it seems to be working.

Of course, you can argue with the substance of what I write, but as long as the style has clarity…

In Defence of Blogging

This is the 31st installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

Not a week goes by these days without someone bashing blogs. Last Thursday, the essayist Mukul Kesavan referred disparagingly to how the “masters of blah have migrated to the Republic of Blog”. Just days before that, Robert McCrum wrote in the Observer of how “the democracy of the Web is in danger of becoming a cacophonous nightmare”. The Times of India famously (and ironically?) wrote last year that “no one can beat Indian bloggers when it comes to self-obsessed preaching, gossiping and bitching”.

I write a fairly widely read blog, India Uncut, so let me jump to the defence of blogging. Firstly, all these gentlemen are right—but they nevertheless miss the point, as Theodore Sturgeon could have told them. When Sturgeon, a writer of science fiction, was attacked for the rubbish that came out of that genre, he famously came up with what is known today as Sturgeon’s Revelation: “90% of everything is crud.”

Sturgeon’s point was that most attacks against science fiction used “the worst examples of the field for ammunition”. And while he accepted that 90% of science fiction was rubbish, so was 90% of everything else. If one just looked at the crud component of any field, it would be easy to dismiss anything.

This problem is amplified in blogging’s case. In journalism, for example, there are filters to publishing. Newspapers and magazines have editors who constrain what goes into print, and the limitations of space ensure that a lot of crud gets filtered out.

Blogging, on the other hand, puts the tools of publishing into every individual’s hands. This is tremendously empowering, but it also means that the proportion of crud that gets published is bound to be far higher than in traditional journalism. To judge blogging by the crud is, thus, meaningless.

What about the non-crud? Well, there are so many kinds of non-crud that it’s hard to generalize about them. People blog for different reasons: to filter for interesting content on the Web; to keep an online diary; to keep their friends updated on what they do; to provide different kinds of utilities; to be read by niche audiences they cannot otherwise reach; to push causes they believe in; to comment on what’s going on in the world; and even to act as a watchdog on the supposed watchdogs, big media.

Every reader is likely to find a quality blog that caters to him or her, while journalism, especially in India, increasingly caters to the lowest common denominator. Also, journalists tend to be generalists, and their coverage of specialized subjects is often shallow. In contrast, specialists on every subject blog about their passions, delving into areas and nuances ignored by mainstream media. Economics blogs such as Marginal Revolution and Café Hayek, and the law blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, are excellent examples of this.

Blogging as a medium provides many advantages that journalists and media outlets would do well to consider. One, blogging has immediacy: Reporters are not dependent on the news cycle to get their work out, and can publish it as soon as they write it. Two, blogging provides them flexibility of space. They can blog a single thought in a handful of words without needing to expand it into a publishable piece, or a 6,000-word essay that their newspaper may not have space for.

Three, a blog adds dimensions to a piece, as one can hyperlink within it to other sources of knowledge and argument that enrich the reader’s experience. Four, blogging allows a personal tone that the dictates of a house style in a publication may not. Five, blogging opens you up to a feedback mechanism that newspapers do not provide. I am not just referring to comments, which some high-traffic bloggers avoid because the noise-to-signal ratio gets out of hand, but to the fact that the blogosphere is essentially meritocratic, and rewards excellence and punishes mediocrity virtually in real time.

If bloggers do not provide value to their readers consistently, if they do not respect their readers’ time and write crisply and lucidly, if they treat their blogging as a chore to be dispensed with, they will not be read. The impact on their traffic will be immediate and visible. In newspapers, on the other hand, such real-time feedback from readers hardly exists. For example, if most Mint readers were of the opinion that my weekly column is a waste of space, it would take a lot of time for that opinion to filter in to the editors, if at all. But if it was a blog, there would be no place to hide. The loss in readership would punish me immediately and visibly.

Ouch, I’m out of space. Damn these newspaper columns! I’m off to blog now—would you like to come along?

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You can browse through all my columns for Mint in my Thinking it Through archives. I’ve written on this subject before in the following pieces: Blogs—The New Journalism.” “Generalising About Bloggers.” “Don’t Think in Categories.”

The most irritating words on the internet

The Telegraph has a list. One that I often find irritating comes in at No. 2: ‘Blogosphere.’ It leads to lazy generalizations, and encourages thinking in categories.

How would Ian McEwan and JM Coetzee like it if you told them that they’re part of the Bookosphere? And then if you begin to rant against the Bookosphere because you don’t like Paulo Coelho and Dan Brown? Now, wouldn’t that be silly? And still…

If you are a child…

… please stop reading this blog right now. It seems that India Uncut is rated PG-13.

Of course, my earlier Blogspot avatar was rated R, so it must be admitted that I am getting more child friendly. In a few years, I’ll be writing for toddlers. Goo, ga, parents suck, walking is boring—all that stuff.

(Link via email from reader justescaped.)

Is there something you’d like to ask…

… John Buchanan? Prem Panicker is due to interview Buchanan, and will incorporate reader-submitted questions that he finds interesting. Almost a Web 2.0 interview, you could say, without the anarchy of a chat. Hop over to leave your suggestions.

And by the by, I’m quite delighted to see Prem blogging regularly on his own space. He’s a magnificent blogger, though he’s often been too busy running large teams of journalists to blog regularly. I’m going to watch that space.

Meiyang Chang, blogger

I think it is immensely cool for an Indian Idol contestant to have a blog. Indeed, make that blogs. Here’s Meiyang Chang’s Blogger page, which lists all his blogs:  The Buddha Soliloques is his regular blog, with travel posts and stuff, Fool’s Imagery contains his photographs, and The Amyegin Outburst has cartoons drawn by him.

Chang comes across on the show as much more intelligent and balanced than the rest of the contestants, and that comes through in his blogs as well. I predicted in my last Indian Idol post that he will reach the final three, and last night’s performance gave me no reason to rethink that. Among other things, his voice has a timbre that sets him apart from the others, and he sings with a certain sukoon, as it were, that most of the other singers just don’t have.

The boys were outstanding in last evening’s episode, and seem to be getting better with every performance. I take back what I said earlier about this year’s contestants not being as good as those in the last two: The boys, at least, are every bit as impressive as their predecessors in the last two seasons, even if there is no one quite as stunning as Karunya was last season.

Speaking of stunning, I never thought I’d think something like this, leave alone open myself to ridicule by expressing it publicly—but isn’t Alisha Chinai just superfreakingcute? The years have sat really well on her…

(More Indian Idol posts here.)

Update: Oops, apologies, forgot to indicate that I got the link to Chang’s Blogger page via email from reader VatsaL.