May 2008

Some influential and serious blogs like the one Stanley Fish writes for the New York Times attract several hundred comments for one post. (So do some that are utterly trivial.) If you’re far down in the list, would you read, let alone consider, the posts before you? A few ultra-precisians will fiercely attack post #89 from the depths of post #523, but sullen #89 doesn’t often reply, so all that scanning goes for naught. Devotees of Chinese Whispers (why Chinese?) will enjoy the outlandish tranformations of the topic that begin to show up, run their little sputtering course and are then replaced by others still more outlandish. Experienced teachers will hang their heads: this is the tutorial from hell.

So what’s it all for?

The blogs at Prospect, offshoots of their articles, have obviously been filtered and monitored, because the comments that appear are thoughtful and courteous. Whether they are representative of the responses we can’t know – it’s down to how far you trust the editors. The blog author takes the time to respond, sometimes to every post, at paragraph length.

Fish-type blog responses seem to be little more than fodder for others. Fish himself sometimes reports on them; presumably there is a growing class of academics analysing them for tenure, poor devils.

It makes one reflect again that vox pop is all very well, but subject to a melancholy limitation: the larger the pop, the weaker the vox.