According to Sara Boxer’s brilliant essay on blogging in the latest New York Review of Books, there are about 100 million blogs on the Internet, only 15 million of which are active. This stat unsettles the prospective blog editor: even if your blog makes it into that 85th percentile, you still have, at minimum, 15 million competitors. And who’s to say you’ll stay in that percentile? “In Japan,” writes Boxer, “neglected or abandoned blogs are called ishikoro, pebbles.” Pebbles: orphaned, inert, insubstantial, irrelevant. The phrase is unerringly accurate—beneath the rarefied upper level of the blogosphere lies an immense graveyard of ideas—millions of tiny flecks of meaning ground into obsolescence.
Fuckin’ terrifying. I mean, it’s not terrifying for you. After all, blogs are bastions of compartmentalization, products of an atomized political and popular culture: liberals line up behind the Daily Kos, conservatives behind Red State. Brooklyn Vegans might enjoy Brooklyn Vegan—Gothamists, Gawkers, and Vultures also have blogs of their own. Although the internet has had something of a leveling effect (just ask the members of Vampire Weekend), blogs are still byproducts of postmodern fragmentation: they allow you to go to your side of this shapeless, transnational, borderless Internet of ours, while I chill out in mine.
Of course some blogs are successful because they foster a sense of community, and reading the latest update on Gothamist or Bwog is, in some abstract sense, a shared experience. Gothamist is apolitical, but its organizing principle is that we’re all in this crowded mess of a city together—indeed, the best of blogs suggest some larger whole, even if a majority of that whole couldn’t quote you the latest City Room headline (for the curious, it’s “Ethnic Press Covers Race With Gusto”).
The Spectator has tried blogging a few times now, and we haven’t been very good at it. The whole has eluded us. And although this past week saw the greatest expansion of online-exclusive coverage in Spectator history, it seems like the idea of online-exclusive Spectator content is somewhat of an anathema: Bwog is for breaking news, the conventional wisdom goes. The next day’s Spectator picks up the pieces. No distractions in between, please.
But the Spec blogs could be more than a distraction. The Commentariat has the potential to be Columbia’s only true open forum for student opinion, an up-to-the-minute running dialogue of voices and ideas on the front page of a Web site that gets around 65,000 hits a day. Bwog and the other sections of Spectator work their respective beats, but the Commentariat could carve out a beat all its own: less formal than Opinion and more incisive than News—less a barometer of campus zeitgeist, and more an open venue for intelligent commentary.
Boxer closed her essay by gushing that “Bloggers at their computers are Supermen in flight. They break the rules. They go into their virtual phone booths, put on their costumes, bring down their personal villains, and save the world.” At their worst, blogs are like ishikoro: evidence of the alienating vastness of an incredibly strange and incredibly young online frontier. At their best, blogs are the exact opposite—a reminder that we can, as Boxer puts it, “inhabit the source of power and hope.”
So come and inhabit it with us—check us out at http://specblogs.com, or come to the Spec Blogs interest meeting this Wednesday night at 10 p.m. in the Spectator office.
The author is student in the School of General Studies and List College. He is the editor of the Commentariat.