My Dilemma with Blogging

This is not my first weblog. In the past, I have maintained multiple blogs. Most were anonymous, although I wrote one blog intended to be a source of information on student council projects with numerous hints as to my authorship of it. That is to say, anyone who knew me would know I wrote the blog. Due to my own failure to popularize the blog, this plan fell through.¹ As for my other blogs, I grew to consider them a drain on time and ceased typing new posts.

Another factor contributed to my absentia from the blogging world. I had read a book last summer entitled “Amusing Ourselves to Death”², published by Neil Postman. In it Postman critiques the conceptual environment of our present society (or at least society in the nineteen eighties). His argument went that with the proliferation of image-based mediums, as opposed to the traditional word-based mediums, society and thought were being transformed for the worse.

Postman argued that books require concentration to read. He further argued that the type of reasoning which books offered was much more profound than anything found on an image-based medium. This is because books are structured much more rationally, in the form of arguments which a person can follow with sufficient focus. This enables them to reread the arguments and judge whether the premises are valid and lead to the conclusion. Books further provide context, which discrete images as seen on television do not. Postman argued that books were the highest form of reasoning and that the Age of Reason in America ³ (the Nineteenth Century, when the United States had one of the most literate populations) was also the era with the most intensive book reading.

Postman’s point was that in an environment highly saturated with literature, in which everything was read, the mind of the average person came to think in highly abstract terms. Words and text convey meaning much more abstractly than explicit images (a picture of a dog or a film of a dog, for instance). Postman maintained that in a society saturated with literature the architecture of the mind developed differently. It became a typographic mind.

Postman classifies the Age of Show Business as succeeding the Age of Reason. The foundations for this Age of Show Business, goes Postman, were laid by the telegraph! According to him, the telegraph laid down the concept of discrete information without context, a change of thought aided by the photograph. This era of discrete information, in which every gram of discourse is done for entertainment, so Postman reasoned, is the extreme result of all these technological (but not necessarily intellectual) innovations. Postman gave particularly egregious instances from the media (the transition on news broadcasts from a pleasant story, like a local resident winning the lottery, to the tragic, such as a homicide) to demonstrate that image-based mediums and much of modern technology has no logic behind it and results in low quality thought.

After reading that book, I grew to distrust television. The quasi-luddite seeds had been planted. In the meanwhile, I further read a piece in The Atlantic ⁴ on the effect the Internet, in particular, had on cognition. The general concept of how context lacking electronic information was had been laid in my mind by Postman. The article in The Atlantic served to apply this reasoning to my beloved Internet in particular. One of the most heinous instances that article described was of a blogger, possessing a doctorate in literature, who could not read any substantial piece of prose. The columnist (Carr) writing the piece himself relayed his own difficulties in reading lengthy passages.

This unsettled me mostly because I have noticed that my reading rate is quite slow. For instance, it takes me about three or four hours to finish a novella like Heart of Darkness. It only strengthened my resolve to discontinue blogging as an activity.

I perceived an overdependence on the Internet in other respects. To correct my grammar, I used spell check on word. To find the proper spelling of a misspelled word I would rely on Google.

Typing, as opposed to handwriting, may even have adverse effects on cognition. Carr noted a chilling tale of how Nietzsche’s writings became much more aphoristic and less rationally structure once he transferred from writing his books by hand to typing his books via typewriter (due to vision problems).

This disturbed me as some of my latter blog posts tended to be “bite sized” and lacked thorough arguments. The medium was affecting my message. So I began to distrust blogging itself, explaining my long absentia.

But blogging is something I truly love to do. I have and will always be faster at typing than handwriting and writing skills are something one has to keep intact with practice. The pen (or keyboard) is mightier than the sword, as it so often is said, and persuasive writing is a quintessential skill. Without blogging, I was spending less time writing, creating optimal conditions for the atrophy of that skill.

So I will resume blogging. But I am resolute on making my blogging style different, more rational and based on higher thought. My models for this process are blogs like Rationally Speaking⁵ and Atheist Ethicist⁶ . These are blogs based on thorough and nuanced argument. If you are curious, I did not choose this blog template to emulate these blogs superficially⁷ , this template is just happens to be appealing to me.

In line with this blog ideal I will take pains to ensure every post here is of high quality thought. Furthermore, I will not immediately prompt readers to another site with excessive hyperlinks. All links and notes of interest will be in an endnotes section.

To be a medium of rationality and advance reasonable arguments on any matter that sufficiently interests me are to be the primary functions of this blog. I may only hope to succeed in the task of persuasion and opening minds.

<sup>ENDNOTES
1.The blog was not particularly enjoyable to write, as well. To reach a broad student audience I had to use rather ordinary and taciturn prose. Colourful language and verbosity put the joy into writing for me, so it was not a very pleasurable experience.
2. Postman, N. (1985). Amusing Ourselves to Death. New York, New York : Penguin Group.
3.Postman also terms it the “Age of Exposition”.
4.Carr, N. (July/August 2008). Is google making us stupid: What the internet is doing to our brains.. The Atlantic
5. http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/ Ironically, Pigliucci (the author of this blog) lead me to Postman’s works and subsequently softened my luddite tendencies with his post “The End of Solitude” (http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2009/02/end-of-solitude.html).
6. http://atheistethicist.blogspot.com/
7. At least that was not a conscious intention. Perhaps, subconsciously, a need to emulate these blogs prompted this rather intuitive decision on template.</sup>