Blogging and Discussions

I was thinking recently about blogging and online discussions. Many, many blogs have comments available to add on blog posts. Sounds like a good idea in principle, though I think “trackbacks” are a better way of doing it (levels the playing field between the author and any commentators; and is more spread out “cyper-geographically”), but that’s a side issue.

I read a lot of blogs. Many of them, probably most, have comments and/or trackbacks available.

I don’t usually read the comments.

This is my tendency, whether I view the post on day 1 (where there are no comments yet) or day 365 (once comments have had time to accumulate).

I don’t because, generally, I don’t care. There is the odd time when I do care about the discussion, or I wonder how this post will be perceived by others. But, most of the time, I’m reading that author/thinker/blogger/whatever because I think that they are informative/clever/entertaining people. I didn’t “sign up” because I thought the readers would be interesting. Now, that just me, I’m not going to try to argue that this is good or bad.

What may be good or bad, is whether blog comments are a good forum for such discussions. That is, aside from constructed social gatherings or events or lectures, or ad hoc sessions on university campuses, where, online, does our collective [human] intellect progress?

I don’t think that blog posts are a great place for that, for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is that either the author has too much sway (they reply to every comment made, which can be useful, or they censor some) or they don’t participate (they never comment, update, etc.). Either way is certainly the author’s prerogative, but if the author never posts or joins in the comment, the comment roll can begin to take on a life of its own and often, IMO, get to a point that is less than informed and not particularly useful. In case I haven’t qualified my every statement so far sufficiently, let me say that this state depends on the readers and some blog readers and topics generally attract better/worse comments. That is, it depends, and I’m generalizing I know.

I ran across a good example today.

A post by Malcom Gladwell on his blog concerning plagiarism. (If the name rings a bell, and you’re not sure why.) I think it’s interesting and, for a change, was reading through the comments. Alas, no response from the author to “rein in” or “inform” the discussion occurring in the comments.

BTW, I loved this line parphrasing/explaining Lawrence Lessig (Free Culture) from a plagiarism article he wrote for the New Yorker, in itself a good read:

“Creative property… has many lives—the newspaper arrives at our door, it becomes part of the archive of human knowledge, then it wraps fish.”