In defense of, and disagreement with, Leah McLaren

The day I decided to swear off the blogosphere was the morning I decided to plug my own name — and the names of several other writers I know and admire — into the search engine at technorati.com, a site known as Blogger HQ (it claims to itemize every new blog on the Internet; last time I checked, the head count was more than 28 million). The results of my search were grim: countless chat rooms full of bitter unpublished writers venomously slagging published ones — their terrible spelling, poorly constructed sentences and outrageous amounts of displaced hatred and envy a testimony to why they became bloggers in the first place.

With all due respect to Leah McLaren—and that amount is considerable, given how much I’m enjoying The Continuity Girl, which I bought based solely on her interview with Lenni Jabour—I believe a lot of what she’s run up against can be explained by Sturgeon’s Law: Ninety percent of everything is crud. It doesn’t help that there’s a legion of bloggers whose sole purpose seems to be to denigrate the mainstream in general and her in particular: taking Google as another datapoint, her own website is currently only the third link in a search for her own (uncommon) name, sandwiched between six pages by schmucks with hate-ons for her.

To those misguided souls, by the way, I say this. Look folks, Leah McLaren didn’t draw those anti-Muslim cartoons, she didn’t swindle her way into a cabinet position, she’s not a right-wing nutter like Ann Coulter or Bill O’Reilly, and she didn’t kill your beloved pet gerbil in grade three. She’s a talented, successful young writer who happens to create a lighthearted, inoffensive column in a national newspaper. The misogynistic vitriol that’s spewed at her—the stuff that’s halfway literate, anyway—is written for reasons and from psychological places that are incomprehensible to me. (And I’m sure you’ll all find your way here to explain them in abhorrent depth using as many abusive references to me and Ms McLaren as possible.)

My own problem with the blogosphere is not that it’s selling out to the mainstream, but that most of it is spectacularly boring. The dominant quality is tedium: writers without editors, fact-checkers or paying subscribers to keep them in check. […] One tempting explanation is that what a blogger has to say is unfit for publication. This is usually true. Much like teachers who teach because they can’t do, the blogger blogs because he can’t publish.

Having said all of that, here’s where I think McLaren doesn’t grasp the blogosphere—at least, my blogosphere.

First, tedium is in the eye of the beholder. I find one of her touchstones, Gawker.com (a New York-based site that specializes in celebrity takedowns disguised as sightings), endlessly tedious; and I’m sure she’d say exactly the same thing about Slashdot, and perhaps even Boing Boing. (Even she would have to love the remixed TTC map though.) This to me is totally understandable, and to be expected: we don’t all butter our bread on the same side.

Second, I debate that corporate sites like Gawker, while being popular, have anything to do with the real blogosphere, the so-called Long Tail. The interesting weblogs are the ones that are written by individuals from all walks of life who just happen to be both passionate about their topics of discussion and sufficiently erudite to express that passion. (I count myself out of that group: Petroglyphs is interesting mainly to me, and often not even that.) To pick three at random from my blogroll, Tim Bray‘s wide range of interests makes Ongoing endlessly fascinating, I’m in some not-insubstantial awe of renaissance man James Tauber‘s various projects, and On the Road is a wonderful online rendition of she-who-is-Kristin Sweetland. None of them have editors, none use fact-checkers, and none are being paid to do what they do online.

(And editors and fact-checkers ain’t all they’re cracked up to be anyway: just look at Antonia Zerbisias’s azerbic for her great coverage of the things that the blogosphere has brought into the open, or read a bit about Jayson Blair.)

Third, the fact that most bloggers aren’t published—and, more, aren’t beholden to their subscribers—is often an advantage: once a blogger has his teeth into something, he won’t let go just because it’s past the news cycle, as well-evidenced by Mike Watkins and his continuing reportage on avaricious political defector David Emerson.

“The word blogosphere has no meaning,” [Choire Sicha] said. “There is no sphere; these people aren’t connected; they don’t have anything to do with each other.”

The final point that shows what I believe to be Ms McLaren’s fundamental misunderstanding of the blogosphere is stated in the quote she chose to end her piece. The blogosphere—the real blogosphere—is entirely about being connected. Comment pages, trackbacks, pingbacks, and the links and links and links between all of them, are the life’s blood of the blogosphere, and the main reason it grew so quickly. And much like the internet itself, the blogosphere routes around damage: that ninety percent crud will remain unlinked and unnoticed, at least in the long term, and its Google juice will slowly dissipate and dry up.

But I guess I’ll have to try to discuss all—well, some—of this with her in person, since she’s swearing off the blogosphere for good. And even if I don’t get a chance (or, more likely, chicken out when given it—me only grunt when pretty girl close) I’m going to keep reading her columns—and aren’t they, at their core, just paper-based blogs?—and her books, which I hope will be frequent and numerous.