On Blogging Romance, And The Summer’s Last Messenger Of Misery
Having suddenly found myself blogging fast and furiously again in August after two months of nothing, I somehow ran into a reference or two to Blaugust (a “festival of blogging”), which I assume I’d heard of before but in which I don’t think I’ve ever participated. It seems to come out of a specific slice of the blogosphere, or just an alien-to-me particular blogosphere of its own, which would certainly explain it.
Today, though, as I sat down to reincorporate some blogs back into my feed reader (from which they’ve been gone since earlier this year) now that baseball is almost over and I’ll perhaps need to cobble together some things to eat up that time, I ran into mentions of something of a dust-up in Blaugust circles.
Apparently, there’s a contingent of bloggers out there who think that if your blog doesn’t include reader comments it isn’t actually even a blog at all.
Harrumph and humbug—and I say that as a blogger of twenty-five years who’s over that time had all of native comments; third-party comments; trackbacks, pingbacks, and webmentions; and even, like now, no form of on-site feedback whatsoever.
I’m not going to belabor this overly much, I don’t think, because I’ve tried not to get lost in the rat’s nest of links discussing the matter. I’d started with Sara, then Juha-Matti, then Crimson, then Naithin, then Bhagpuss, and then mostly decided I’d had enough of the conversation. There’s plenty more of it to be found linked from this small subset of posts.
Blogs, of course, do not need to have comments in order to be blogs. Many of the very first web logs on the internet were written by hand directly into the HTML files of the sites in question; from where, exactly, in this context would comments even have come?
It’s another matter entirely what Blaugust as an event wants to do in terms of defining itself and its own, well, terms. If it wants to be an event limited and restricted to blogs with comments, that’s an entirely valid distinction to make for the purposes of whatever sorts of community involvement they’re seeking to foster. Having, as far as I know, never participated, I don’t have any kind of insight into their event in specific.
On the wider, philosophical issue, however, the folks saying that blogs are not blogs if they don’t have comments are, simply and quite flatly, wrong.
The second part of the title here comes from a quote by Henry Rollins, but you’ll have to click through for the rest of it to find out why I used it here when talking about something of a miserable bit of discourse.
One other thing I ran into while building out the blog folder in my feed reader is Ava wondering if blogging is romantic. Ava, it turns out, is the original source of the blog challenge questions I answered in my IndieWeb Carnival post on self-expression back in March.
Ava talks about the lower-case romantic nature of blogging up top, but what I find most interesting is the bottom half, about upper-case Romanticism.
Romanticism prioritized subjectivity and emotional authenticity over reason and objectivity. Blogging that’s personal and reflective […] does this by offering a medium to express your inner life, thoughts, dreams, and struggles with a sort of intimacy and rawness that traditional publications and social media personalities lack.
[…]
What about the the Romantic ideal of the solitary (genius) artist that is misunderstood by society but in touch with deeper truths and their own feelings? That may be something some bloggers relate to: their role as observers, outsiders, or truth-tellers, writing outside the bounds of institutions […], motivated by personal vision rather than profit, and unbound by popular taste.
As someone who has written about blogging as empathy engine, blogging as poem, and blogging as music, I think it’s safe to say where I come down on the question.
In fact, I do want to say just a couple of things about what Naithin had to say about comments.
When there’s no space to respond, engagement naturally falls away. Readers care less, connect less. Even when the writing is excellent — sometimes especially when it’s excellent — it can be deflating to reach the end of a post and find there’s no natural way to either offer a nod of appreciation, or better yet, to carry the conversation forward without jumping through friction-filled hoops.
It’s nice that Naithin mentions “friction” here, because as I started reading this paragraph I was getting set to be all, “But what about the value of friction?” There is something to be said for not making it easy for people to reply to something you have said. Surely, that’s a lesson we’ve learned on social media again, and again, and again.
Not having comments is not somehow anti-communitarian, because any given blogger is always and forever entirely free to write a response on their own blog. One could argue, although I won’t (well, maybe a little bit), that this is more community-minded than trying to silo comments upon your posts into a section of your own website.
What I will argue is that it’s at least possibly much more romantic (or would this be Romantic) to invite people to respond on their own blogs, because it would mean they thought enough about what you had to say to devote a tiny portion of their own space to having something to say in response. It meant that their thoughts about your thoughts were important enough to them to overcome the friction involved.
While it might be true, as Ava says, that there is an “idealization of solitude in the blogosphere”, that’s precisely what makes one blog replying to another, in these terms, romantic (or would this be Romantic). Your blog is yours to make as you see fit, for you to feel at home within your own words without intrusion. To, with deliberation and care, bring the words of someone else into that space, in order to converse in some public, distributed, epistolary fashion—rather than the storm and stress of an unbounded feed of commentary, so prone to so many of the same pitfalls as the feeds of social media—how is that not, in fact, the epitome of Romance?