Since the popular literature of the Early Republic, and especially the early American novel, is a crucial source for my work on the idea of home, I can't avoid the scholarship of Cathy N. Davidson. Nor do I want to.
Davidson's work on the novel as a democratic genre, her explorations of how novels were read, and by whom, and to what purpose and effect -- all of her painstaking research, rendered into brilliant prose, has cut a path through the wilderness, along which I will gladly and gratefully walk for as far as it will take me in pursuit of my quarry.
At the same time, Davidson's work on learning and pedagogy -- especially writing pedagogy and the new literacy -- is likewise unavoidable for me. I teach rhetoric (a.k.a. "freshman comp") at my university, and our standardized syllabus requires a blog project as part of our students' portfolio of work. This requirement is due in no small part to the influence of Davidson and other scholars who are championing the blog as a tool for teaching writing -- perhaps even as a substitute for the research paper or term paper.
A recent article in the New York Times describes Davidson's take on "Blogs vs. Term Papers," and situates her as holding "a more extreme position" among professors and writing teachers who are all alike concerned with finding the best way to teach the best practices that make for the best writing both within and beyond the academy. The concern to teach writing practices that have some practical application beyond the ivied walls of the Ivory Tower is made explicit in Davidson's pedagogy, but, as I will argue below, I believe a concern for practicality is implicit in the commitments of those of us who continue to see pedagogical value in the research essay.
Now, as the reader may have gathered, I am fond of blogging. It is a fantastic medium for exploring ideas and establishing connections with fellow explorers working at other institutions. (Oh mercy -- what is it with all these metaphors of hunting, exploring, wandering in the wilderness? Clearly, I have been spending too much time with Catharine Sedgwick and James Fennimore Cooper.) Indeed, I think blogging can at least help create the conditions for establishing a vibrant intellectual community, a virtual post-modern Republic of Letters.
There's no doubt that blogging emphasizes the sense of writing for an audience and highlights the potential for interaction with one's readers in a way that writing a traditional term paper may not. The (in)formal conventions of blogging may help students better recognize that scholarship is not about building little (or big) monumental plinths that just stand there and gather dust -- it's not about writing essays, term papers, theses, dissertations as finished objects and final words. Rather, scholarship is about participating in and contributing to a larger conversation. So to the extent that blogging foregrounds this crucial aspect of scholarly work, I think it can be a valuable use of students' time and energy.
But I worry that a near-exclusive emphasis on blogging is not a very good use of students' money -- especially working-class students, first-generation students, students who are going into debt to attain that which an education confers. As Davidson has made clear in her own research on the early American novel and its readership, education confers empowerment -- often in ways that the educators never intended and that the educated never expected. And maybe that democratic and democratizing empowerment will be (already is?) the lasting legacy of blogging, the internet, the new literacy. In the meantime, though, I believe that championing the blog as the primary form of scholarly writing puts students at a profound disadvantage, not merely in the job market but, more crucially, in the public square.
In an era when most of the paths to erudition were closed to women, when a university education was not merely impermissible but also impossible because most women were not trained to read Latin or Greek, the novel democratized education and became a means by which disempowered women and men could not only gain knowledge but also produce knowledge and shape public discourse. As a result, the doors of educational opportunity that had been closed to women, to the working-class, to minorities, have been and are being opened. And I can see the similarities between the novel and the blog as genres that open up access to knowledge.
In some ways, though, championing the blog over the research paper as a cornerstone of a university education seems to be turning back the clock, taking back part of what has been gained. Knowledge is power, and the knowledge of how knowledge is constructed and deployed as a tool of empowerment and disempowerment -- not just how to recognize the process, but how to do it -- is the most powerful knowledge of all.
Judging from the Times' description of how Davidson uses blogging in her pedagogy, it is clear to me that she doesn't teach blogging as a substitute for careful research, but as a means of exploring new avenues for students to articulate what they have learned in ways that excite and ignite the interest of others. I'm sure that her students leave her class well-equipped to pursue and present a savvy, sophisticated argument across a full range of knowledge platforms. More power to them.
Nevertheless, despite the broad democratic potential of the blogosphere, there is still enormous privilege, power and prestige in traditional academic prose. Nobody -- not even the English department at Stanford -- is going to throw that baby out with the bathwater. So no matter the potential of blogging as a means of (re)producing knowledge, the best educated, the most privileged and empowered among us, will continue to learn the long-form, old-school research essay.
In this age of the soundbite, this era of intentional and celebratory ephemerality, this epoch of the quick and the slick and the flickering flash of momentary thoughts twittering across the collective mindscape, whose knowledge will carry the day? Whose perspective will endure to shape the present and open or close the future? In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In the country of those who don't learn to value, much less know how to construct, a sustained, logical argument based upon careful research and a judicious treatment of evidence, David Barton and Newt Gingrich will be our greatest historians, our most influential public intellectuals.
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Sabtu, 28 Januari 2012
Jumat, 04 November 2011
A Big Tent
I very much appreciate the discussion that has taken place over the last week or so about women in US Intellectual History. I am grateful to know that everyone agrees that S-USIH should be a place of welcome and openness to everyone who does intellectual history.
Three members of the membership committee had a meeting just yesterday to discuss how to encourage more members to join our society, conference, and blog. We thought of specific, concrete strategies to grow our audience and especially active members. We will present this at the executive meeting on November 17, but I would be glad to hear further suggestions. I was encouraged to see Mary Ellen Lennon’s post, in part, because hers is a new voice adding to the dynamism of our conversation.
I wanted to clarify something and ask a further question. Yes, my original post was about my feelings and my experiences, but it was meant as a starting point for a broader conversation, and in that way it was a success. I haven’t studied the place of gender in US Intellectual History. That was why I was so careful to explain that I was only speaking from the point of view of one woman. I’d also like to point out that many identity based analysis is grounded in individuals’ feelings. I attempted to explain what I had experienced, what I felt about it and why, and give possible interpretations that were and were not based in identity.
I value this community and its pursuit of a newly invigorated field of US Intellectual History. I am often inspired by how much this group has accomplished in a half decade.
Finally, I would like to try to redirect the conversation toward some of Michelle Moravec’s concrete insights and ask if others have insights or answers they would like to share. Moravec wrote
Ok so my side project last year was a book about online communities of mothers. Thinking with that knowledge of gendered online comm theory a few things stick out
1. you have to "join" the FB page, which is limiting
2. some people are "added" by others, which creates a sense of "insiderness"
3. from the quick skim it seems that discussion is tilted towards bigger thinkers, political discourse oriented intellectual history, which is fine, but as has been noted, if one is not an "expert" on those people one might not be inclined to pipe up
4. on the other hand the tone is highly civil, which I would think would encourage participation by new people
The numbers of the responses to my original post and to Mary Ellen Lennon’s response indicates that this is a topic of great importance to our community. I’d like to use David’s concept of the Big Tent to ask, in a concrete and productive way, how we plan to create that structure and encourage the diversity within it.
Jumat, 28 Oktober 2011
Where are all the women?
On the S-USIH facebook page (Varad affectionately termed it Susie; the executive board has taken to calling it Sushi--any opinions?) David Watt kindly inquired whether the lack of women posting/commenting on our blog and our fb page was indicative of a trend at large.
Before I reproduce the fb conversation, I feel like I should comment as the single public female face of the group (though not the only female member, by any means. For example, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen has come to every conference, presenting brilliant papers every time).
I consider myself an intellectual historian for three reasons. One, when I was having difficulty as a young student picking a part of the world to focus on, I realized that every time I formulated a topic, it was about educated, articulate people. Two, I was trained by David Bailey, an intellectual historian who was trained by Henry May, David Hollinger, and Kenneth Stamp. Three, the people I study qualify as intellectuals--although not all the women would have agreed with that label of themselves.
Yet, I often feel like I don't belong in this group. Why? Well, partly my own insecurity (perhaps a large part). That insecurity makes me question everything I post here, especially since I'm on the job market this year. I need to project confidence, but it is easier for me to laugh at my own flaws. I grew up in a small town where I had to mask my intelligence in order to make friends. It's hard to sluff off that smiling self-mockery. I also tend to think of blogging as a more personal extension of academics. Here is where I can put all the self-conversation that goes on behind what I put on the academic page. However, few of the others write as personally as I do--and sometimes I feel like my personal tales are a bit superfluous compared to their very measured, intelligent comments on the past and the present.
The other reason I don't always feel like I belong is that my people are not your people. Though I am usually familiar with the names the others write about, there are four years of dissertation writing between me and the last time I read a book about the people who frequent this blog. That is part of the reason I am so curious to see what happens next semester, the first time I am teaching intellectual history as a survey. I would be more comfortable if I was teaching black history, but that wasn't an option.
But what about gender? Does that make me feel like I don't belong? Let's just say it's still under debate. I have an unproven sense that intellectual history can be the bastion for men who reject gender and race based analysis. I worry that instead of incorporating new modes of analysis, S-USIH can become a self-selecting ghetto. It is, I suppose, easy for me to write this when I have many more open positions to apply for because I study race as well as intellectual history. Still, I would encourage S-USIH members to look forward and be open, rather than insular and angry.
Every time I try to run away, though, several things draw me back. I genuinely enjoy working with the others on the S-USIH executive committee, and they have often talked me through my anxieties. I think that it is important to infuse race and gender, to the extent that I do, into this blog and society. And I have to admit that as much as the platform daunts me, I also enjoy inhabiting it.
For those of you not on facebook, I will copy the fb conversation, after the jump:
Before I reproduce the fb conversation, I feel like I should comment as the single public female face of the group (though not the only female member, by any means. For example, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen has come to every conference, presenting brilliant papers every time).
I consider myself an intellectual historian for three reasons. One, when I was having difficulty as a young student picking a part of the world to focus on, I realized that every time I formulated a topic, it was about educated, articulate people. Two, I was trained by David Bailey, an intellectual historian who was trained by Henry May, David Hollinger, and Kenneth Stamp. Three, the people I study qualify as intellectuals--although not all the women would have agreed with that label of themselves.
Yet, I often feel like I don't belong in this group. Why? Well, partly my own insecurity (perhaps a large part). That insecurity makes me question everything I post here, especially since I'm on the job market this year. I need to project confidence, but it is easier for me to laugh at my own flaws. I grew up in a small town where I had to mask my intelligence in order to make friends. It's hard to sluff off that smiling self-mockery. I also tend to think of blogging as a more personal extension of academics. Here is where I can put all the self-conversation that goes on behind what I put on the academic page. However, few of the others write as personally as I do--and sometimes I feel like my personal tales are a bit superfluous compared to their very measured, intelligent comments on the past and the present.
The other reason I don't always feel like I belong is that my people are not your people. Though I am usually familiar with the names the others write about, there are four years of dissertation writing between me and the last time I read a book about the people who frequent this blog. That is part of the reason I am so curious to see what happens next semester, the first time I am teaching intellectual history as a survey. I would be more comfortable if I was teaching black history, but that wasn't an option.
But what about gender? Does that make me feel like I don't belong? Let's just say it's still under debate. I have an unproven sense that intellectual history can be the bastion for men who reject gender and race based analysis. I worry that instead of incorporating new modes of analysis, S-USIH can become a self-selecting ghetto. It is, I suppose, easy for me to write this when I have many more open positions to apply for because I study race as well as intellectual history. Still, I would encourage S-USIH members to look forward and be open, rather than insular and angry.
Every time I try to run away, though, several things draw me back. I genuinely enjoy working with the others on the S-USIH executive committee, and they have often talked me through my anxieties. I think that it is important to infuse race and gender, to the extent that I do, into this blog and society. And I have to admit that as much as the platform daunts me, I also enjoy inhabiting it.
For those of you not on facebook, I will copy the fb conversation, after the jump:
- Lauren Kientz Anderson This is something we've talked about. I do feel a mite bit lonely at times.21 hours ago ·
- Varad Mehta When Lauren started blogging, the percentage went way up. Don't ask me to calculate how much. A lot of the people who comment here know each other personally, so in that sense it functions as a personal page where "friends" are talking to each other. That said, I counted 20 women in the 155 members (which is sometimes 151 members and sometimes 153 for some reason). That's 13 or 14 per cent by my rough math. I have no idea how that compares to the field of intellectual history as a whole, but my impression is that it's one in which men have preponderated.19 hours ago · ·
1 person
- Andrew Hartman I would love for some fresh analysis as to why intellectual history continues to attract more men than women, even though it commonly incorporates the methods of the cultural turn that also served as an implicit critique of the gender conventions of older intellectual historical methods. As a Society, male-female imbalance is something we're conscious of and would like to change. This year's conference program features 50 women by my count, well over 1/3 of participants, a more even ratio. One of our plenary sessions is dedicated to U.S. Women's Intellectual Traditions. So we're a work in progress. http://us-intellectual-his
tory.blogspot.com/2011/08/ program-fourth-annual-us-i ntellectual.html us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com A general note on this schedule: this post is the official schedule of our confe...See More15 hours ago · - Varad Mehta So perhaps the preponderance of guys here isn't really indicative of anything more than the fact that the most active members are guys. There are five main writers on the blog, and one's a woman. As the Sabermetricians would say, SSS (small sample size). As for women in the field as a whole, it seems there are plenty if you turn the magnification down a bit. And history as a whole seems pretty much 50-50 these days. Unlike, say, philosophy, which still has lots of problems. I think I posted a link about that here ages ago.15 hours ago ·
- Andrew Hartman Varad: No, I think those interested in intellectual history-qua-intellectual history tend to be men, based if nothing else on notions about how it was narrowly practiced 50 years ago prior to the social and cultural turns. But hopefully this year's program is a sign that this is changing.6 hours ago ·
- Constance Clark I identify as an intellectual historian and am on this list but i seldom have time to talk to anyone on Facebook because I am on too many university committees. Perhaps women have a harder time saying no to university committees? Or maybe it's just me.5 hours ago ·
Kamis, 25 Agustus 2011
What Constitutes a "Philosophical System"?
As a practicing intellectual historian with the good fortune of having an academic teaching post---with no summer teaching commitments---the last weeks of August can be wrenching in relation to one's summer work. I've spent large chunks the past three months reading, researching, and writing---essentially on one very difficult chapter of my manuscript. Letting that go to get ready for classes has been tough. Poor me, I know. But I'm quite grateful for the privilege. This was my first summer of that kind after many years in the academy.This wrenching has been especially tough because my ambitions were high: I had hoped to revise two dissertation chapters for my book manuscript. I thought the revision of my prior work was going to be easier---go faster. But it didn't. So I'm trying to sort through the consequences, and make some hard decisions. What made the summer so tough?
My difficulty consisted of heavy background reading, drafting, redrafting, cutting, and parsing some tedious philosophical work.
My human subject is Mortimer J. Adler [right], and I'm trying to understand a philosophical transition that took place in his life in the Sixties and early Seventies. This transition had important effects on how Adler viewed the role of the great books idea in society. My summer reading in his philosophical work from that period has presented a number problems, several of which I've been able to distill into a five-word question: What constitutes a philosophical system?If you're somewhat familiar with Adler, you might be wondering what was so hard? You probably associate his name with Thomism, neo-Thomism, Aristotelianism, neo-Aristotelianism, Scholasticism, or neo-Scholasticism. Several historians and oppositional contemporaries also called him a Medievalist in philosophy. More advanced observers know that Adler had affinities for realism or common-sense realism. I discussed some of the details of the latter in four posts this summer (began here and continued through July 30).
Education researchers often associate Adler's philosophy of education with a school of thought known as "perennialism." Most proponents of great books programs, including those at prominent great books school or schools possessing those kinds of programs (Honors, etc.), fall within the perennialist school of educational philosophy.As I pondered Adler's thinking in the 1960s and 1970s, however, I found that the extensions of his common sense realism, or what Bennie R. Crockett called his "eclectic epistemology," branch well beyond education (perennialist adherents are, by definition, restricted to educational thinking). In addition to education, Adler extended tenets of his thought to personal ethics, political philosophy, human rights, economics, social institutions, war and peace, religion, and even futurology.
I use the phrase "great books liberalism" to capture some of this larger thinking in my manuscript. Though I'm happy with that in the context of my book project, I'm unhappy with it in relation to Adler's biography and his overall philosophical thinking. Indeed, I'm inclined to see the tenets of his thinking, his assumptions and applications, as the components of a larger system. For now I'm content to bounce between a number of shorthands---the "Adler Paradigm," the "Adlerian System," or the "Adlerian School"---for lack of any better, more lyrical, phraseology. "Adlerian School" probably has the most appeal, but I don't want to over-emphasize the well-known educational applications of his thought.
But this raises a number of larger questions: When does someone's philosophy, or philosophies, reach the quantitative and qualitative breaking point---holding forth sufficient complexity and multiple applications---where it transitions into a school of thought? Or, what constitutes a philosophical system? Must the creator designate her or his thought a system? Must one have followers who are practitioners? What if you build a school that few to no students attend? How much peer recognition must one have to be acknowledged a school of thought? Does eclecticism deny coherence? When can a historian declare the existence of a school?I'm now convinced, in contrast with some other recent historians and observers, that Adler's thought had sufficient peer respect, breadth, complexity, and coherence to be called a school of thought. And I'll briefly argue for this in my manuscript, but I'm still interested in your thoughts. What's the tipping point between having a philosophy and authoring a system? - TL
Kamis, 18 Maret 2010
A (Non-USIH) Intellectual Historian On The History Of Blogging
In a NYR Blog piece titled "Blogging, Now and Then" and posted today, Robert Darnton explores precedents for the means and content of knowledge passed along in non-standard forms. Here are a few salient passages (bolds mine):
- Blogging brings out the hit-and-run element in communication. Bloggers tend to be punchy. They often hit below the belt; and when they land a blow, they dash off to another target. Pow! The idea is to provoke, to score points, to vent opinions, and frequently to gossip.
- The most gossipy blogs take aim at public figures, combining two basic ingredients, scurrility and celebrity, and they deal in short jabs, usually nothing longer than a paragraph. They often appeal to particular constituencies such as Hollywood buffs (Perez Hilton), political junkies (Wonkette), college kids (Ivy Gate), and lawyers (Underneath Their Robes). Politically they may lean to the right (Michelle Malkin) or to the left (Daily Kos). But all of them conform to a formula derived from old-fashioned tabloid journalism: names make news.
- This subject deserves more study, because for all of their explosiveness, the blog-like elements in earlier eras of communication tend to be ignored by sociologists, political scientists, and historians who concentrate on full-scale texts and formal discourse.
- [Look at a] newspaper from eighteenth-century London. It will have no headlines, no bylines, no clear distinction between news and ads, and no spatial articulation in the dense columns of type, aside from one crucial ingredient: the paragraph. Paragraphs were self-sufficient units of news. They had no connection with one another, because writers and readers had no concept of a news “story” as a narrative that would run for more than a few dozen words. News came in bite-sized bits...
- Two to three hundred years ago, the term anecdote meant nearly the opposite of what it means today. Instead of representing a trivial incident or unreliable hearsay, as in the expression “anecdotal evidence,” it conveyed the notion of “secret history”—episodes concerning the private lives of important personages that had actually taken place but could not be published openly. According to contemporary dictionaries and Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the concept derived from Procopius, the Byzantine historian of the sixth century B.C.E.
- Whether exchanged orally in a café, scribbled on a scrap of paper, or combined as paragraphs in a newssheet, anecdotes operated as the primary unit in a system of communication. Many of them found their way into print. They were picked up by famous writers like Voltaire, but more often they appeared in anonymous tracts known as “libelles.”
- The anecdotes constituted the early-modern equivalent of a blogosphere, one laced with explosives; for on the eve of the Revolution, French readers were consuming as much smut about the private lives of the great as they were reading treatises about the abuse of power. In fact, the anecdotes and the political discourse reinforced each other.
So, is Darnton right in that "names make news" in the blog world? Or is that simply a reflection of the fact that we seek specificity and do not prefer philosophical musing via blogs?
Does Darnton have a real sense of the breadth of knowledge conveyed by blogs today? I mean, there seems to be a lot of narrative in blogs. And many, like USIH, are not based on conveying secret knowledge but rather looking at knowledge from other directions. Blogs "today" seem more about diversity and perspective than any ancient definitions of anecdote or the inability, or lack of desire, to read narrative.
Finally, what of Darnton's ominous warning? Are today's libelles pushing political systems to the brink of revolution? If so, I would offer that USIH is not a part of that movement. I would say that we are trying rather to reform knowledge than revolutionize academia. And the diversity of the blogosphere today, apart from USIH, would seem to make historical comparisons to pre-Revolutionary France tentative at best. - TL
- Blogging brings out the hit-and-run element in communication. Bloggers tend to be punchy. They often hit below the belt; and when they land a blow, they dash off to another target. Pow! The idea is to provoke, to score points, to vent opinions, and frequently to gossip.
- The most gossipy blogs take aim at public figures, combining two basic ingredients, scurrility and celebrity, and they deal in short jabs, usually nothing longer than a paragraph. They often appeal to particular constituencies such as Hollywood buffs (Perez Hilton), political junkies (Wonkette), college kids (Ivy Gate), and lawyers (Underneath Their Robes). Politically they may lean to the right (Michelle Malkin) or to the left (Daily Kos). But all of them conform to a formula derived from old-fashioned tabloid journalism: names make news.
- This subject deserves more study, because for all of their explosiveness, the blog-like elements in earlier eras of communication tend to be ignored by sociologists, political scientists, and historians who concentrate on full-scale texts and formal discourse.
- [Look at a] newspaper from eighteenth-century London. It will have no headlines, no bylines, no clear distinction between news and ads, and no spatial articulation in the dense columns of type, aside from one crucial ingredient: the paragraph. Paragraphs were self-sufficient units of news. They had no connection with one another, because writers and readers had no concept of a news “story” as a narrative that would run for more than a few dozen words. News came in bite-sized bits...
- Two to three hundred years ago, the term anecdote meant nearly the opposite of what it means today. Instead of representing a trivial incident or unreliable hearsay, as in the expression “anecdotal evidence,” it conveyed the notion of “secret history”—episodes concerning the private lives of important personages that had actually taken place but could not be published openly. According to contemporary dictionaries and Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the concept derived from Procopius, the Byzantine historian of the sixth century B.C.E.
- Whether exchanged orally in a café, scribbled on a scrap of paper, or combined as paragraphs in a newssheet, anecdotes operated as the primary unit in a system of communication. Many of them found their way into print. They were picked up by famous writers like Voltaire, but more often they appeared in anonymous tracts known as “libelles.”
- The anecdotes constituted the early-modern equivalent of a blogosphere, one laced with explosives; for on the eve of the Revolution, French readers were consuming as much smut about the private lives of the great as they were reading treatises about the abuse of power. In fact, the anecdotes and the political discourse reinforced each other.
So, is Darnton right in that "names make news" in the blog world? Or is that simply a reflection of the fact that we seek specificity and do not prefer philosophical musing via blogs?
Does Darnton have a real sense of the breadth of knowledge conveyed by blogs today? I mean, there seems to be a lot of narrative in blogs. And many, like USIH, are not based on conveying secret knowledge but rather looking at knowledge from other directions. Blogs "today" seem more about diversity and perspective than any ancient definitions of anecdote or the inability, or lack of desire, to read narrative.
Finally, what of Darnton's ominous warning? Are today's libelles pushing political systems to the brink of revolution? If so, I would offer that USIH is not a part of that movement. I would say that we are trying rather to reform knowledge than revolutionize academia. And the diversity of the blogosphere today, apart from USIH, would seem to make historical comparisons to pre-Revolutionary France tentative at best. - TL
A (Non-USIH) Intellectual Historian On The History Of Blogging
In a NYR Blog piece titled "Blogging, Now and Then" and posted today, Robert Darnton explores precedents for the means and content of knowledge passed along in non-standard forms. Here are a few salient passages (bolds mine):
- Blogging brings out the hit-and-run element in communication. Bloggers tend to be punchy. They often hit below the belt; and when they land a blow, they dash off to another target. Pow! The idea is to provoke, to score points, to vent opinions, and frequently to gossip.
- The most gossipy blogs take aim at public figures, combining two basic ingredients, scurrility and celebrity, and they deal in short jabs, usually nothing longer than a paragraph. They often appeal to particular constituencies such as Hollywood buffs (Perez Hilton), political junkies (Wonkette), college kids (Ivy Gate), and lawyers (Underneath Their Robes). Politically they may lean to the right (Michelle Malkin) or to the left (Daily Kos). But all of them conform to a formula derived from old-fashioned tabloid journalism: names make news.
- This subject deserves more study, because for all of their explosiveness, the blog-like elements in earlier eras of communication tend to be ignored by sociologists, political scientists, and historians who concentrate on full-scale texts and formal discourse.
- [Look at a] newspaper from eighteenth-century London. It will have no headlines, no bylines, no clear distinction between news and ads, and no spatial articulation in the dense columns of type, aside from one crucial ingredient: the paragraph. Paragraphs were self-sufficient units of news. They had no connection with one another, because writers and readers had no concept of a news “story” as a narrative that would run for more than a few dozen words. News came in bite-sized bits...
- Two to three hundred years ago, the term anecdote meant nearly the opposite of what it means today. Instead of representing a trivial incident or unreliable hearsay, as in the expression “anecdotal evidence,” it conveyed the notion of “secret history”—episodes concerning the private lives of important personages that had actually taken place but could not be published openly. According to contemporary dictionaries and Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the concept derived from Procopius, the Byzantine historian of the sixth century B.C.E.
- Whether exchanged orally in a café, scribbled on a scrap of paper, or combined as paragraphs in a newssheet, anecdotes operated as the primary unit in a system of communication. Many of them found their way into print. They were picked up by famous writers like Voltaire, but more often they appeared in anonymous tracts known as “libelles.”
- The anecdotes constituted the early-modern equivalent of a blogosphere, one laced with explosives; for on the eve of the Revolution, French readers were consuming as much smut about the private lives of the great as they were reading treatises about the abuse of power. In fact, the anecdotes and the political discourse reinforced each other.
So, is Darnton right in that "names make news" in the blog world? Or is that simply a reflection of the fact that we seek specificity and do not prefer philosophical musing via blogs?
Does Darnton have a real sense of the breadth of knowledge conveyed by blogs today? I mean, there seems to be a lot of narrative in blogs. And many, like USIH, are not based on conveying secret knowledge but rather looking at knowledge from other directions. Blogs "today" seem more about diversity and perspective than any ancient definitions of anecdote or the inability, or lack of desire, to read narrative.
Finally, what of Darnton's ominous warning? Are today's libelles pushing political systems to the brink of revolution? If so, I would offer that USIH is not a part of that movement. I would say that we are trying rather to reform knowledge than revolutionize academia. And the diversity of the blogosphere today, apart from USIH, would seem to make historical comparisons to pre-Revolutionary France tentative at best. - TL
- Blogging brings out the hit-and-run element in communication. Bloggers tend to be punchy. They often hit below the belt; and when they land a blow, they dash off to another target. Pow! The idea is to provoke, to score points, to vent opinions, and frequently to gossip.
- The most gossipy blogs take aim at public figures, combining two basic ingredients, scurrility and celebrity, and they deal in short jabs, usually nothing longer than a paragraph. They often appeal to particular constituencies such as Hollywood buffs (Perez Hilton), political junkies (Wonkette), college kids (Ivy Gate), and lawyers (Underneath Their Robes). Politically they may lean to the right (Michelle Malkin) or to the left (Daily Kos). But all of them conform to a formula derived from old-fashioned tabloid journalism: names make news.
- This subject deserves more study, because for all of their explosiveness, the blog-like elements in earlier eras of communication tend to be ignored by sociologists, political scientists, and historians who concentrate on full-scale texts and formal discourse.
- [Look at a] newspaper from eighteenth-century London. It will have no headlines, no bylines, no clear distinction between news and ads, and no spatial articulation in the dense columns of type, aside from one crucial ingredient: the paragraph. Paragraphs were self-sufficient units of news. They had no connection with one another, because writers and readers had no concept of a news “story” as a narrative that would run for more than a few dozen words. News came in bite-sized bits...
- Two to three hundred years ago, the term anecdote meant nearly the opposite of what it means today. Instead of representing a trivial incident or unreliable hearsay, as in the expression “anecdotal evidence,” it conveyed the notion of “secret history”—episodes concerning the private lives of important personages that had actually taken place but could not be published openly. According to contemporary dictionaries and Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the concept derived from Procopius, the Byzantine historian of the sixth century B.C.E.
- Whether exchanged orally in a café, scribbled on a scrap of paper, or combined as paragraphs in a newssheet, anecdotes operated as the primary unit in a system of communication. Many of them found their way into print. They were picked up by famous writers like Voltaire, but more often they appeared in anonymous tracts known as “libelles.”
- The anecdotes constituted the early-modern equivalent of a blogosphere, one laced with explosives; for on the eve of the Revolution, French readers were consuming as much smut about the private lives of the great as they were reading treatises about the abuse of power. In fact, the anecdotes and the political discourse reinforced each other.
So, is Darnton right in that "names make news" in the blog world? Or is that simply a reflection of the fact that we seek specificity and do not prefer philosophical musing via blogs?
Does Darnton have a real sense of the breadth of knowledge conveyed by blogs today? I mean, there seems to be a lot of narrative in blogs. And many, like USIH, are not based on conveying secret knowledge but rather looking at knowledge from other directions. Blogs "today" seem more about diversity and perspective than any ancient definitions of anecdote or the inability, or lack of desire, to read narrative.
Finally, what of Darnton's ominous warning? Are today's libelles pushing political systems to the brink of revolution? If so, I would offer that USIH is not a part of that movement. I would say that we are trying rather to reform knowledge than revolutionize academia. And the diversity of the blogosphere today, apart from USIH, would seem to make historical comparisons to pre-Revolutionary France tentative at best. - TL
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