Do you write, or are you a writer?

I want to link to a NYTimes Magazine article by James Traub that I read towards the end of the semester. Traub is, I think, such a clear writer, something that I aspire to be. Here's a favorite piece of reportage from that article:

One of [Biden's] former aides — Washington is rife with them — told me that she had learned an important life lesson from her boss: “Question people’s judgment, not their motives.”

That seems like a great piece of advice. It also says something about Traub who's able, probably in limited conversation with a person, to elicit a fundamental lesson that Biden gave to this aide of his. It's like if you asked someone, "what's the most important thing your parents have taught you," and they gave you a gem like this.

Being a good writer is something that won't wane with the economic woes of brick-and-mortar newspapers. If communication is a good skill to have, and it is, then thinking and writing is the best exercise at improving at communication.

Something that writers encounter is thoughts about who is reading their work. How will they judge me? Will they like what I'm writing about? Andrew Sullivan doesn't have comments on his blog. Seems like a big affront to the democratic standards of the blogosphere. So, I asked him, does he ever edit what he writes when he considers how readers might perceive it? He said he doesn't ever self-edit, or second guess what he's going to write based on thinking about his audience. (So, you might ask, why not allow comments?)

Consider Mark Pincus. Mark a successful Internet entrepreneur, and on top of the social networking applications market right now. He keeps a personal blog where he writes about business decisions and shares personal thoughts. He writes about his thoughts on the Congressional deal-making here, and writes about his conception of the new Internet era here. This is a terrific line (especially that latter post) to the thoughts of someone who is doing very important things that shape the lives of many in society. But look at the comments he's getting. They're not reflective. They're people who are bringing their gripes about his company's products to his personal blog. That's a chilling reception to someone who wants to share their thoughts. Which should prompt the question, is the best form of blogging to broadcast to the Internet? Will the best kind of writing come from a form where you write with consciousness of how others will perceive your post and comment on it?

No doubt that blogging is important. It's a chance to share ideas with people who might be able to build on your ideas. It allows you to transcend people in your immediate space and reach out to the .005% of the world that has substantive thoughts about the ideas you have.

But sharing with everyone is a weird concept. Weird? But why? Writers (like Jon Chait and his TRB) do it all the time. But I think successful writers in the public space have had years to hone their voice. To wit, you don't just start writing by signing up to write TRB. If you can firm your voice before the limelight, it seems like that preparation could be useful once you're getting attention.

Building, Awareness, and the Benefit of Online Chat

Zach,

I'd like to point out a few things I really enjoyed about your post:

• "As an inherently interactive blog, we can aim to increase our self-awareness"
  
  One of my qualms that I enumerated in my initial post is that blogs often broaden, and don't build, in the sense that we have scattered knowledge about a lot, but no deep knowledge about any one thing, which is essentially useless. (This was, as I remember, the central thesis of Nick Carr's article in The Atlantic). But here you signaled blogging as an approach to building: you write, "we can aim to increase our self-awareness."
  
  We're not just writing and hoping something develops. I don't think continued production works or means anything. (A favorite quote of mine, "We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true.") That's why The New Republic's blog has lost resonance with me. It's just conventional wisdom commenting on other conventional wisdom. I don't think it serves to really educate, even though it does make us aware of political goings-on.
  
  Hopefully, a blog can have a trajectory that serves to deepen. And I haven't fingered my blogging trajectory yet, but I mostly know what it's not.
  

• "I think with awareness dishonesty becomes a lot harder and openness a lot easier, and that it ultimately makes for a much more interesting writer to read."
  
  I think this is a gorgeous point, but I don't agree with it. I see self-awareness as a tool (or force), that doesn't have a direction associated with it such as the honesty-dishonesty dimension. For example, in Zen in the Art of Archery, Herrigel became a master archer under the direction of Awa Kenzo. In order to achieve mastery, he had to cultivate a mental state that had much more to do with awareness than anything physical. After Herrigel returned to his native Germany, he became a Nazi. So the point is, how could someone who cultivated such great awareness go down such a wrong path?
  
  If you think about actors who are especially self-aware, you realize they are using their abilities to deceive or act. The beauty of Andy Kaufman's acts was that you were never sure whether he was faking it or being serious. Was he really traumatized by an audience laughing at him? He would make many believe so.
  
  Kerouac had a special style of writing. I remember his jive-talk in On the Road. But the stream-of-consciousness narrative style (I've got to read every book on this list) just has to be different from the psychological theory of stream-of-consciousness. William James' conception was that stream-of-consciousness refers to everything that is passing through the mind. Since much of what passes through the mind is pre-linguistic (all of these inarticulated thoughts), it would be very hard to record them all to paper. I won't say it's impossible to capture stream-of-consciousness to paper, and in fact, I think that's the benefit one gets from writing and meditating--capturing those fleeting thoughts and bringing them into reality through writing.
  

• "Personal interactions offer intangible human qualities that an internet community could never provide: a joke is always funnier with others to laugh with, and most would agree there to be a physical quality to loneliness"
  
  I think I can empathize with this point, because I can recall laughing so hard in person with friends. But I can also recall laughing during online conversation. I think that talking online, having the ability to leave your immediate time and place, and often communicate anonymously means that you don’t have to deal with a lot of social stigma or “layers.”
  
  You seem almost sure that offline interaction trumps an online interaction. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of Chris Langan, who demonstrated brilliance at an early age, but due to his poverty and the place where he grew up, he could not connect himself to the right mentors and professors. So he grew up, with IQ off the charts, working as a bar bouncer, finally married, and then spent his time in the rural country reading and working on a broad theory on physics, continuing to be cynical of universities and the general system (recall your paraphrasing of Obama who said we need to work within institutions...clearly it's bad that Langan had such a dismal outlook on universities as a function of his limited interaction with them).
  
  Or my good friend, I'll call her Tiffany, who found a chatroom on AIM in the 7th or 8th grade. She would come home after school and meet the same group of kids day after day. They were from all over the world. They developed deep friendships, had wondrous discussions, and their relationships persist to this day.
  
  Or my friend Katarina, growing up in rural Pennsylvania was turned on to fashion and books and movies from reading the Sunday New York Times. In an article one Sunday, the Times profiled a fashion blogger. So Katarina went online, found this blogger and discovered a whole community of like-minded people. Katarina's choice was to either follow fashion, music, movies, and discussion topics of her high school (to provide context, my public high school was generally into MTV and a culture of fake-toughness), or she could plug into this whole world of intrigue and humanism.
  
  The big point I'm trying to draw on is that online social networks can be a means of allowing people to express their inner beings. Maslow writes about the gap between "I want" and the "I am," which is to say that it is harder for us to enact the "I want" into the "I am" often because of our environment. We have not perfected dialogue through social networks yet, so the cases of Tiffany and Katarina are the exceptions and not the rule. But I think we can develop them to a point where our interests, wants, and needs can become better expressed, and through social networks we can find ways to help people bridge the "I want" and "I am."
  
  (This might be an interesting topic to draw on from a social policy perspective. One of the things I've heard Michelle Obama talk about is a need for more mentorship in society. It might be practical to reach young people through existing institutions. But consider that a large amount of young people's time is spent on Facebook and MySpace. If online social networks could better facilitate dialogue and a matching up of needs, I think it would be a key way to realize the need for mentoring.)
  

Elliot

Blogging, blugging, feeling bluggerish

Zach,

I think the best way to kick off this blog is to first take a jab at the culture of blogging. I have long had the question, why blog at all? I can think of a few reasons not to: I don't want my private thoughts being broadcast when I don't know the readers. Because, what if blogging my thoughts will come back to haunt me in some form? So by that token, if I am to blog, then my thoughts will undergo some regulation, which means my writings will be a less-than-honest reflection of my ideas. (To counter this, remember when Sullivan said that he never self-edited and was not worried about judgment.) And if I engage in not-quite-the-truth expression on a regular basis, it's possible that my behavior will influence my self-image and I'll become less-than-honest in my daily expression.

(A digression: This is, I think, what occurs when we read our own profiles on Facebook: We know our interests...it was us who entered them, after all! So why do we read our own profile? I think it's to learn about ourselves. But it's the most shallow way to learn about ourselves because we created the profile. Psychologist Daryl Bem calls this behavior self-perception*).

On the other hand, I think there are tremendous advantages to blogging. First of all, how can thoughts or ideas really come back to haunt you? Dave Eggers offers a critique on our generation in A Heartbreaking Work, when we says that we should not have an inhibition to share. What does it matter if we tell people the details of our lives or spill the contents of our heads? I think one possible fear is that we will be discovered to be non-normal, and then our ideas or our selves will be discounted. But Eggers's case for sharing, I think, overcomes this fear.

A benefit offered by blogging is that it offers the same kind of personal definition that is available through writing in many other forms. If you write letters, keep a journal, or write a column for a paper, you have to undergo a period of reflecting and personal definition that non-writers simply don't do.

A point about this blog is because I am writing a letter to you and receiving a letter in response, it becomes an interaction as opposed to an individual process. New ideas will develop as a function of interaction that would not otherwise come out writing by myself. And this latter principle is a feature of the blogging world. You can find people who express interests close to your own just by searching the blogosphere. You can interact with people world away by commenting on their blog posts. For someone growing up in Farmland, USA with a lot of intelligence and interests about the world, the Internet becomes a liberating force.

I think a powerful cultural/psychological debate to have is, should a person engage people in their immediate surroundings and give up personal interests in order to pursue friendships? Or should a person give up people in immediacy in favor of an Internet community where they can truly engage their mind? I lean towards the second option, but it's worth acknowledging that you stand to lose the potential for people dissimilar from you to expand your horizons. Although if you're into Russian literature and the boys are into drinking brewskis and singing Kid Rock on tha karaoke, I don't know how much horizon expansion is going on.

(By the way, as we were driving through Indiana's countryside last July 4th, I remember pointing out how it was fascinating to consider how it was likely that every one of those houses had Internet, so children and teenagers there were experiencing a childhood completely unlike children living there before 1998/1999 (or whenever Internet penetration reached Indiana's countryside). For that matter, young countryside Hoosiers have the same experience as a kid in Manhattan or Silicon Valley. And this dramatic change--from spending time outside and watching television to spending more time on the computer interacting on Facebook and YouTube--happened in less than 10 years time!)

Another big benefit of blogging is that your writings are being attended to by other people. An obvious point, I know. But the fact that we can broadcast our ideas and interested people can tune in and read our thoughts is an intriguing idea. Rhoni told me how her friend Jeremy automatically keeps track of and shares his runs on Facebook (he uses Nike+, I think). He told her that knowing other people will view his progress is a huge motivation to run. I think this point is fascinating. Most people run for its intrinsic incentive: to keep fit and keep the body's physiology in order. Now the main motivation is extrinsic: we want others to view our runs. (Though, to be fair, I think extrinsic incentives existed before Nike+ in the form of marathons. White people love marathons.)

Lastly, I'll say that blogging has importance in one more manner that is similar to other instantiations of writing: there is a huge benefit to creating. Writing is much more valuable than talking because you're bringing something into existence in a way that has permanence.

That's it for now. Up next: Reflections on Gladwell's Outliers.

Hope you're enjoying the Florida sun,

Elliot

(* I forgot Daryl Bem's self-perception theory, so I first searched Google to no avail. Then I asked Aardvark, and before I got any responses on Aardvark, I took the question I used on Aardvark and Googled with it again. This time I got a hit. That is to say, the whole process of having to crystallize a question for others to understand made it clearer for me. Although the only person who got the answer correct on Aardvark is a fascinating young researcher situated in Cambridge. If I were to continue the conversation, it would be a fascinating connection. Think about the role of the Internet and social networks now!)