Are letters better than blogs?
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
March 8th, 2006 at 7:57 pm e
Great stuff. EphBlog would be eager to play host to such an idea, or to provide a feed to the (slightly) wider world from wherever you set up.
This also related to the conventions of commenting. I could leave an extensive comment here or I could leave the same comment on EphBlog and then link back to here. Which should I do? Prolific bloggers tend to do the latter, but there is no correct answer. Writing on EphBlog is much more likely to be widely read, but it seems rude to hijack the conversation from here to there.
March 8th, 2006 at 8:34 pm e
By all means, hijack! I might turn off comments to this site anyway. Discussions in the comments section are usually chaotic, because they are organized by time instead of logic, and they rarely involve the writing and re-writing that characterizes a well-thought epistle. My view is that if we are to have a coherent discussion, its course ought to be carried through multiple blog posts or letters that carefully mark out the structure of argument. Ideally, I would turn off comments here, and thoughtful writers would email me and, if they didn't mind on-lookers to the discussion, post a copy of their thoughts on their own blogs. After all, blogs are easy enough to set up these days on Blogger (or, for Ephs, on wso/blogs).
March 9th, 2006 at 2:38 pm e
How did David Kane find this? By going to wso/~emiller and clicking on Letters? Really?
I think this is an excellent idea. I don't really agree with your blind preacher thesis, because people who start blogs aren't in the dark about who reads them. For one thing, the only people who will read them are people who know about them, and those are the people that the blogger has told. But for another, people have site meters. David checks his site meter all the time; I check mine every few days. I know where my readers are, and what pages referred them.
Also, the problem with many letters is not that there is nowhere for other people to comment, but more that the content does not interest a wide variety of people or should not be shared with a wide variety of people. Most people don't write actual letters anymore, and write e-mails instead. (I was much more interested in your post when I read the title on EphBlog and thought you were advocating letter-writing, and less interested when it turned out that by "letter" you mean "e-mail." I am a big proponent of letter-writing, like on a piece of paper in an envelope with a stamp.) However, the vast majority of e-mail content is nothing worth putting online.
"Shall we have dinner?" "Yes, let's do that."
Not interesting.
"Ooh, you'll never guess what I heard about so-and-so…"
Not appropriate to go online, and perhaps not interesting, either.
Of course, if the only kind of e-mails ("letters") you ever write are intellectual essays, go ahead. But those aren't "letters," or even e-mails; they're intellectual essays.
March 9th, 2006 at 7:14 pm e
Diana asks "How did David Kane find this? By going to wso/~emiller and clicking on Letters? Really?"
Actually, Morty runs a script every five minutes that checks for substantive changes on all williams.edu servers and e-mails him the changes. He was kind enough to forward this one to me. Aren't you on his "Cool Stiff at Williams" distribution list? You should be!
By the way, I (regularly) check EphBlog's statistics for, uh, research purposes. Yeah! That's the ticket.
But, really, I found this via Evan's homepage via the new Willipedia page for student homepages via WSO main page via (of course!) EphBlog, where all the best journeys begin. Alas, Evan has disabled my WSO password so, instead of adding to the wonder that is Willipedia, I have nothing better to do than surf and surf and surf . . .