Letters

Hi DeWitt,

If you don't mind, I want to try out a new idea on you.

This letter is my idea for a new form of blogging. You are reading this in your email, but a copy of it will also be posted on my site; there, anyone can write comments. On that version of the letter, the salutation will link to your home page, and I will post links to any replies of yours that are too full for the comments section. Let me explain why this form is necessary.

Blogs are a great way for organizations to make informal announcements, for would-be journalists to report and comment on a slice of our changing world, and for people in respectable positions to offer analysis. I have nothing to offer in the way of improvement to those writers.

But I find that other types of blogs--personal, experiential, or speculative blogs--suffer because the authors don't know their audience, quite literally. They have ideas to share, and simply put them "out there," without knowing whether anyone is listening. These amateur bloggers have much in common with blind preachers. If the blogger is lucky enough that someone leaves a comment, he can try to infer his audience's characteristics from it, but he may know nothing more about his audience than the number of readers, and he may know their preferences only by how the readership changes after certain posts.

The dynamic changes as soon as a blogger earns a link from another blogger; there is a dialogue. Two blind men have found a listener in each other. If these dialogues happen often enough and between enough people, a sort of ecosystem emerges, wherein bloggers can, for the first time, write with the expectation that particular individuals will read the result.

Until they come to know their audience, non-professional blogs tend toward introspection, self-expression, and the less nice names for it: self-absorption, self-righteousness, and narcissism. What do you say to a world that is not paying attention? The most common genre, I find, is premature memoir. Humbler writers stick to ideas, but they may lose interest without evidence of an engaged readership.

I want a medium where I have an immediate audience, an engaged audience, and potential for a discussion as wide as the current subject's appeal. The immediate audience is important to me, personally, because I can't talk without knowing my audience; my attempts to start a blog have ended in pathetic, withered, and humorless posts. On the other hand, I have found that my letters and emails, where I have some idea about who is reading, (sometimes) contain lively writing and interesting ideas. Letters have an added advantage, because courtesy requires the addressee to read it through!

The one thing that a traditional letter lacks is potential for a wide discussion, should other people become interested. That's where my "innovation" comes in: I will start putting my thoughtful emails and letters on the web, somewhere out of the way, and allow anyone who comes across them to leave a comment. That's it!

The hope, of course, is that the addressee and thoughtful commenters will respond with letters in kind, and perhaps put copies on their own blogs (if they maintain them), or on some specialized software designed for these public letters. I think the format could make for interesting public dialogues, and engage people who are too shy for the formality of starting a blog.

What are good uses of public letters? I can't begin to name them all, but as for myself, I'll probably use the form to try out new ideas and respond to other people's ideas, because that's how I like to occupy my time. I might also take the opportunity to write to institutions and tell them why they should do things differently, which I hope will provoke some interesting discussion.

To start out, I think blog software will work fine for the purpose. It might be nice to have an email interface for posting, so that a writer could just CC his web site, but after writing a thoughtful letter, it's hardly added trouble to paste the contents into a web form. Comments should be enabled, I think, and authors of full replies would be encouraged to start a letter archive of their own. It would be each writer's responsibility to link to replies, and to letters that are being referred to. One could imagine a fancier set-up, where the servers talked to each other about who's responding to what, but for complicated discussions I think it would be preferable for the writers themselves to highlight particular letters and arguments in the thread. For the sake of being able to read a correspondence beginning to end, it would be courteous if writers posted copies of received letters, but did not enable comments.

It would be a good exercise to imagine the ideal software for handling public letters--adding conveniences for storing email addresses and home page addresses, say--but I can't say what ought to be a priority until I feel more familiar with this form. I know right now that it would be great if the software automatically put an anchor next to each paragraph--perhaps a number in the margin--so that respondents could link to a specific part of a long letter. (If you look at the page source, you'll notice I added invisible, numbered anchors by hand.)

Anyway, since you're a prolific writer and a connoisseur of ideas, I'd like to know what you think of this mode of discourse as distinguished from blogs; and whether you might give it a shot. Time, of course, permitting.

Or so I wrote March 8,

Evan