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February 3, 2004
TT: Three from the mailbox
We got a
lot of traffic yesterday, most of it drawn by my
notes on blogging
and OGIC's reflections on
New York provincialism. All this without any scabrous hints from other bloggers! Such are the rewards of the pure of heart.
A lot of bloggers who linked to my notes on blogging took issue with Note No. 2: "I know very few people over fifty, and scarcely any over sixty, who ‘get' blogging." Many of them hastened to point out that they were 50 or older, so there! All I can say is, good for you. That's one point about which I'd love to be proven wrong--and maybe I am. To date, my own face-to-face experience, much of it based on encounters with big-city types who work in the worlds of art and journalism, suggests otherwise. Could I have fallen victim to an unexpected attack of New York provincialism? I sure hope so.
Now, on to some individual reader mail:
The New York state of
mind gets in the way of a great many other viewpoints and cultural
takes. Popular culture (pop music, television, genre fiction, graphics
and arts that are out of favor among professional, mostly NY, critics)
has long been ignored by the mavens of "high culture." But thousands
of practitioners of those popular or folk arts have worked and lived
and died outside of Manhattan's sphere. Not only that, but they have
created wondrous and satisfying works. There are dozens of cultures in
the country, the world, and trying to put them into an arbitrary
hierarchy does all artists and thinkers a real disservice. But then, you two already recognize that at some level or you wouldn't
wrestle with the question the way you do. And I probably wouldn't
chime in with my views. The Web and the Blog encourage the shattering
of hegemonies, for better and for worse.
I made up the term "reverse provincialism" a while back when I started thinking about how mass media have altered what a provincial knows. Anyone who owns a TV these days is very familiar with the world view, the concerns and the fads of New York and Los Angeles (or at least the elites thereof) whereas (I imagine) there are plenty of people who live in those cities who are deeply ignorant of the outside world. Just one of the many great inversions that modern life has brought about.
To replace the little magazines of the 20th century [Note No. 2 in my "Notes on Blogging"] seems to me an ambitious project. And I'm skeptical because I don't see, for example, how experimental prose (a concern of mine) could have any place in the blogworld. Sure, blogs can link to essays, etc., and they do, but I wonder how much serious reading AT ALL takes place over the internet.... Owing to their temporal (and serialized) nature, blogs more closely resemble journalism than anything else. One reads them like one reads the news. And the very fact that blogs seem to operate in dialog (take for example the NYTBR debacle, widely and ‘incestuously' discussed on lit blogs), further contributes to their ‘timeliness'. How typical is it for a reader to delve into the historical archives of a blog? For how long are ‘discussions' related to a post active? Not very long it seems to me. However, the ability to read archived posts in perpetuity is worth noting. How many times have I read the ‘reader's respond' section to a magazine and wish I had the original article in front of me?
Once again: "About Last Night" has the smartest readers in the blogosphere. Thanks to you all.
Posted February 3, 2004 12:00 PM
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