Whatever’s bothering you, however crappy you’re feeling, this Tumblr will make you feel at least a little bit better. Unless you’re a bad person.
(Hat tip to Moglia.)
Tag: blogging
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This Tumblr is a BFD
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Internet Comments vs. Knowledge
Apparently, I’m not the only one who doesn’t like Internet comment sections. Neither does science. From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:
In an experiment . . . about 2,000 people were asked to read a balanced news report about nanotechnology followed by a group of invented comments. All saw the same report but some read a group of comments that were uncivil, including name-calling. Others saw more civil comments.
“Disturbingly, readers’ interpretations of potential risks associated with the technology described in the news article differed significantly depending only on the tone of the manipulated reader comments posted with the story,” wrote authors Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele.
And as though to echo the previous post’s title, “Comments. Boy, I Don’t Know”:
“I hope you’re not going to ask me, ‘What should we do?’” she said, laughing. “Because I don’t know.”
I think I do. Don’t have comments sections.
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Comments. Boy, I Don’t Know.
I don’t generally like comments sections. Though I appreciate the ethos behind them, the notion that a blog is a place where folks can continue an article’s discussion beyond the written post, it rarely serves this purpose. Most of the time, in my experience as a reader and writer, comments are usually a bulliten board for banal or thoughtless exclamations, and at worst, a cesspool of hostility and idiocy.
Freethought Blogs clearly is identified with a robust commenting culture, and its commenters have exemplified both the best and worst of this. Indeed, most of the time in this particular blog’s short history with FtB, the comments have been friendly and considered.But it doesn’t take much to draw the attention of the parade of fanatical ignoramuses.
So, look, I want to give the well-meaning folks a fair shot at participating in the discussions here (and I’ve actually really enjoyed some of the comments on posts about technology and gadgets) before I decide to shut the whole comments section down. Which I’m really close to doing.
But in order to have folks behave in a manner that I think suits this blog, I probably need to lay out what the comments policy actually is. Fine then.
So here’s how this is going to go.
First and foremost, this is my blog. I am the supreme evil dictator of this stake of Internet property. It’s not a democracy, it’s not a town meeting with the city council. I’m not disinterested in other people’s perspectives, but in the end, this is my space and it’s going to reflect that fact.
I have no obligation to host a comments section at all, and many of the best blogs have none (Andrew Sullivan, John Gruber, etc.). And no, that’s not an example of “censorship,” and it’s not silencing anyone. The Internet is a big place, and if you really want to respond or react to something I’ve written, you can do it on your own blog. Your links back will only increase my Google ranking.
While I do have comments, here are the rules, and they’re simple. You can’t comment here just to abuse or be an asshole to me, other commenters, or anyone else. I will be the one who decides what counts as abuse or “being an asshole.” Debate and disagreement with me is fine, but if you get shitty about it, I’ll mark you as spam. I may just decide you’ve got a crummy, nasty attitude, and that’ll mean you’re out. Again, I will be the one who decides what counts as shitty, crummy, nasty, or what have you. Again, if this doesn’t please you, start your own blog and complain about it there.
Needless to say (or is it?), racist, sexist, bigoted comments, or anything containing threats, won’t be tolerated.
If a comment thread goes off-topic, straying into subjects irrelevant to the post in question, I’ll probably turn comments off for that post.
Life is short, and I have no incentive to waste my time by subjecting myself (or my tens of readers) to a bunch of abuse and garbage.
Hopefully, things will be cool, and there’ll be little reason to act on any of this.
But if it becomes a waste of time or even an additional source of stress, well, I’ll just shut the section down.
(Note: The title of this post is inspired by this immortal exchange. I hope Jed Bartlet does not want to kick my ass.)
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Not All Deep Rifts Are Worth Diving Into
Kate Donovan, who is a real blessing to the interwebs, makes a great point about the Deep Rifts in the skepto-atheosphere, which I will then pour a teaspoon of cold water on.
Kate writes:. . . if we’re going to be intellectually honest, we DO need to be arguing, critiquing, and otherwise speaking up about intolerable behavior. We need to–to cherrypick from the Bible myself–cast the beams from our own eyes. Stepping out and saying that you don’t want to be involved in all that drama is equivalent to what we object to of the religious. I’m sorry it’s stressful, exhausting, and disheartening. But we’re worth it.
I completely agree, and as I wrote in my vaguely infamous post at Skepchick a while back, this movement owes it to itself to determine what it’s going to really be about, and act on it. It has to work out the “now-what?” after we all agree that God and Bigfoot are hoaxes. Go Kate, Go us.
Now the teaspoon of cold water.
There is a difference between engaging in a grand debate about what this movement should be, and drama for drama’s sake. My fear is that for a while now there’s been little in the way of arguing and critiquing, and a lot more of what looks like a drama addiction fed by self-created crises. That is what I want to opt out of.
You know where I stand on the issues at hand. The fact that there is a contingent of folks who are fighting for the right to joke about rape and perceive oppression of the white male is an abysmal state of affairs, and yeah, we need to root that shit out. But we are also, being humans, prone to indulge in a lot of back and forth that is merely gratuitous, with folks from all corners seeking out things to offend them, and then shouting from the rooftops about how righteous is their indignation. That st00pid vide0 by that guy is an example of this, a goddamn serenade by moonlight from a freaking gondola to an imagined oppression of white males. Christ. What are we even talking about??
I don’t want to have arguments with that, but just call it out for the nonsense it is. I don’t want to comb my Twitter stream for poorly-chosen words from well-meaning folks so I can express how hurt I am. I don’t want to languish in victimhood as though just being victimized were somehow a form of activism. I don’t want to waste time arguing with someone who thinks being blocked from interacting with a Twitter account is somehow equivalent to being taken to a CIA rendition site. That’s not the grand debate I signed up for.
So, to be clear, Kate is right. Let’s argue and critique and get our house in order. Let’s not for a moment shy away from stamping out the worst in us, exhausting as it all can feel. But let’s also be clear that there’s little substance in much of the noise right now, and a lot of the bickering is more preening than pious. Opting out of that crap is not avoiding the fight, it’s a sign of knowing what battles are worth fighting.
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Social Lasers of Cruelty
Jaron Lanier, a kind of web reverse-guru, perhaps the Anti-Shirky, talks to Smithsonian magazine about what he sees as the existential threat of Internet anonymity.
“This is the thing that continues to scare me. You see in history the capacity of people to congeal—like social lasers of cruelty. That capacity is constant.”
“Social lasers of cruelty?” I repeat.
“I just made that up,” Lanier says. “Where everybody coheres into this cruelty beam….Look what we’re setting up here in the world today. We have economic fear combined with everybody joined together on these instant twitchy social networks which are designed to create mass action. What does it sound like to you? It sounds to me like the prequel to potential social catastrophe. I’d rather take the risk of being wrong than not be talking about that.”
[ . . . ]
We read of online bullying leading to teen suicides in the United States and, in China, there are reports of well-organized online virtual lynch mobs forming…digital Maoism.
He gives me one detail about what happened to his father’s family in Russia. “One of [my father’s] aunts was unable to speak because she had survived the pogrom by remaining absolutely mute while her sister was killed by sword in front of her [while she hid] under a bed. She was never able to speak again.”
It’s a haunting image of speechlessness. A pogrom is carried out by a “crowd,” the true horrific embodiment of the purported “wisdom of the crowd.” You could say it made Lanier even more determined not to remain mute. To speak out against the digital barbarism he regrets he helped create.
I think Lanier is maybe a bit too in love with his own novelty, the web pioneer who now hates the web, and takes some of this to an unnecessary extreme, but I take his point. If there's anything about the web, and blogs particularly, that I find loathsome, it's comment sections and bulletin board sites that traffic in anonymous anger and hate-spewing. Frankly, I was a little afraid to come to Freethought Blogs because I know how tumultuous a lot of the commentaries can get (so far, most of you have been lovely).
I'd never be one to say that folks should not be allowed to be anonymous online. Far from it. But I do think there's a lot of merit in the individual sites and blogs deciding that for their own plot of Internet real estate, folks have to go by their real names in order to play. That probably doesn't work for, say, YouTube, but for a given publication or service, I can definitely see why that would be preferable — a declaration that at such-and-such a site, you stand by your words with your real identity. And if you don't want to play by that rule, you can simply not participate in that site, or respond on your own blog or platform outside of that site, as anonymously as you want.
That doesn't solve what Lanier fears, of course, but at this point, what could?
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The Banal Quest for Validation
ZachsMind just posted a very thoughtful response to a post of mine from a few weeks back that seemed to get a wee bit of attention from the Tumblrsphere. The meat of my post that has been a few times bequoted is thus:
How many readers does it take to make a blog worthwhile? What constitutes a sufficient number of pageviews for a given post? The most obvious answer is that there is no line of demarcation; the act of writing is an end in itself. If I were to have a meaningful conversation with a single person, or even just have something good and substantive to say to an audience of one, would that not be enough?
That was me. Then Zach writes:
Ignoring of course the obvious irony that it takes Fidalgo a blog post about people ignoring his blog to again take notice of his blog (or is that coincidence? I never can tell…)
Oh zing.
That’s not the thoughtful part, but it is funny. Anyway, Zach’s post, which you should read in its entirety, rests on the oft-posited bit of healthy idealism that says it’s really All About the Journey:
It’s not about where we’re going, but the things that happen to us along the way. It’s not about attaining whatever goal you set for yourself or what was set forth by others. It’s about whether or not you enjoy yourself as you go, about the people you meet while traveling, and about the traveling itself. It’s not about the degree or diploma or commendation or trophy. It’s about all the little things you learned to get you to that place… .
Etcetera. Nothing wrong with this, but nothing I have not been advised before. Then Zach, recounting his own first forays into webbyness, hits me with this:
I had wanted people to recognize my gift of gab and my off the wall sense of humor and my quirky individual me-ness. I was hoping somewhere out there an unspecified number of people would naturally and unequivocally accept me for who I am, even if I never figured out just what that was. I reached out. Sometimes I was met with a handshake. Sometimes I was met with a slap on the wrist.
Yowch. That, while not intended as a barb, hit me where it hurt. Because that’s what’s really underneath all of this, right? An age-old and probably banal quest for validation, undertaken in cyberspace where one is a little more protected from the usual prejudices of the physical world (fewer people can judge me for my looks, for example, from my blog). But of course it wasn’t as simple as my fantasy would have it. It takes more than a well-intentioned quirkiness to get people’s attention and have them stamp you with the Humanity Seal of Approval.
And more to the point, it’s not smart to seek validation in this way, or in really almost any way. As I’ve been very painfully learning, if I don’t already buy my own self-worth, all the retweets in the world won’t buy it for me. Trite, but horrifyingly true.
And then Zach gets all poetic, which I totally didn’t expect.
We are all Near Earth Objects revolving and spinning around the sun and each other. Sometimes we bump into one another and that’s sometimes fantastic and sometimes that’s cataclysmic.
How many readers does it take to make this worthwhile? One. You.
It’s all gravy.
Okay okay. I get it. I haven’t digested it quite, but at least I get it.
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So Long, and Thanks for All the Text
The text stops here.My webby little heart is broken, as I have just read that author and scholar Alan Jacobs is retiring his blog Text Patterns. It’s hard for me to overstate Text Patterns’ influence on me and this blog. Jacobs opened up a whole new world of topics to cover in my own blog writing, helping me discover a passion I barely knew I had; exploration of the history, fate and role of the written word in our modern technological landscape. This is a common enough topic, I suppose, on the Internet, but Jacobs covered it with erudition, accessibility, humor, and humility. When I blog about books, writing, and communication, I am very much aping — if only aspirationally — Jacobs and Text Patterns.
I don’t remember how I discovered Text Patterns to begin with, but I suspect it was probably via a linking by Andrew Sullivan, or perhaps I was googling about for things Kindle-related. Whatever the first cause, I found Text Patterns at its original home, the now-defunct “Salon-for-conservatives” known as Culture 11 (which also featured the likes of Conor Friedersdorf and David Kuo). When I realized what Culture 11 was, I was a little trepidatious to be hanging around there, but it became apparent very quickly that Jacobs’ blog was not some ideological screed in a web browser (nor was the wider Culture 11), but a thoughtful, independent-minded destination. When Culture 11 went under in 2009, I presumed all was lost, but then the magazine The New Atlantis picked up Jacobs’ blog, and Text Patterns continued. Now, I have to suffer its loss a second time.
And it is Jacobs’ more conservative roots that make my affinity for his work all the more remarkable to me. I spent a couple of years blogging nearly exclusively on atheism and the harm done by religion. Jacobs is not only a Christian, but a scholar whose frequent focus has been theology. Yet, like Andrew Sullivan, he is clearly no Tea Party know-nothing, but a brilliant man who has arrived at very different conclusions than myself in regards to things like the nature of reality and, presumably, (because I have not read any political writing he may have done) policy.
Those differences matter little. In fact, they make him and his work all the more fascinating to me. My tens of readers will already know how I adored his recent book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. I hope, as Jacobs notes in his final post, that this ending means more writing along those lines.
I am glad that Jacobs will be able to pursue new avenues of discovery outside the bounds of his blog, but the end of Text Patterns leaves a gaping black hole in the Internet that will not easily be filled.
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Bloggy Relevance: Thoughts on What This Blog Is and Ought to Be
As long-time readers of this blog probably already know, I have at various times struggled over the identity of this blog, and my identity as a blogger or, really, as an “Internet personality.” I first began blogging in 2004 just to try and promote my first (and so far only) CD, Paul is Making Me Nervous. That didn’t last too long, and it wasn’t terribly interesting.
And you know the old saw: If you want to build an online audience, you need to find your niche and stick to it. I had not found mine yet.
In 2006, I realized I wanted to blog on politics more specifically, so I started a site called FifteenNineteen. By this point in Web history, of course, everyone and their mother already had a political blog, but I intended my blog to distinguish itself as being a kind of educational chronicle: I was about to start graduate school for political management, and I was going to blog on politics from that vantage point: what am I learning, and how does it apply to current events? It will not surprise you to know that I did not follow this tack at all, and simply defaulted to fairly typical punditry, peppered with some Onion-esque fake news articles (some of which I think were pretty damned funny).
I was still nominally maintaining the old self-promotion blog, and I didn’t like the idea of juggling both, so I merged the two into the first incarnation of Near Earth Object. I still focused mainly on politics, with occasional notes on things like my acting career, music, etc. I puttered along.
At the height of the 2008 campaign, a fire was lit under my hindquarters on the subject of atheists’ treatment in American politics, and after a few posts in the old Near Earth on that topic, I realized that I had found a niche I was really quite passionate about. So I more or less left Near Earth Object derelict, save for occasional generally-political posts, and started Bloc Raisonneur, a blog specifically focused on atheists’ place in the culture. I had a lot of fun working on it, learning from it, and I built a tiny following and a modicum of relevance in the atheist online community, which was solidified when I began blogging as a columnist for Examiner.com as the National Secularism Examiner.
Eventually, though, I began to work in the atheist movement itself professionally, and so opining on the topic no longer reflected only on myself — I now also represented a major secularist organization, whether I intended to or not. So both Bloc and my Examiner column atrophied.
But I didn’t feel through with blogging, so I backtracked somewhat, abandoned the idea of a specifically-atheist blog, and resurrected Near Earth Object, the blog you’re reading right now. After my assault in October and the subsequent major changes in my life since, for a while I was very sparse in my blogging.
But as you may have noticed, I’m picking it back up. It means something to me, and I care about making a strong blog product that I can be proud of.
And here’s the thing: my relevance has all but totally dissipated. My posts are read (when they are read) pretty much exclusively by friends on Facebook, and a few from Twitter. One friend only today remarked that due to my refusal to blog within one specific niche, I am not “seriously blogging” anymore.
But the fact is that I think my writing is stronger than it’s ever been. I cover a wide variety of subjects that includes politics, atheism, religion, book reviews, technology, as well as the personal. I write long essays and post brief, Tumblr-like one-off posts or images. I think as an Internet publication, Near Earth Object is strong.
My sense of a job well done is mitigated by the failure of the blog to validate itself through pageviews. My ego wants recognition, for my opinions to resonate beyond the confines of my social network.
I could easily jump back into atheist-only blogging, but why? There are countless other blogs of that nature, and the well-established, well-read among them are fairly entrenched at this point. If I felt that I had something crucially unique to add to the discussion — on a regular basis — that might change things, but it seems to me the grander debate within the atheist blogosphere is on something of a loop: we shouldn’t be aggressive, oh wait yes we should, repeat. (I should note I have an idea for an atheist-centric blog, one that specifically tracks the portrayal and treatment of atheists in the media, a kind of Media Matters for heathens, which I might one day pursue.) Beyond these common discussions, we all essentially agree with each other, and I feel that I can do more good for my blasphemous brethren by highlighting our movement within the context of a publication that is broader in scope.
So this is where we are. I have no plans to change the format of Near Earth Object. My only recourse to relevance, I think, is to write even better posts, as often as I can; to offer unique perspectives (both my own and those of others) on a wide array of subjects that stir readers to think in ways they may not have thought before (or, even, just to provoke a cheap laugh). I’ll make my non-specific blog the best non-specific blog it can be, and that, I suppose, will have to do. I hope more people come by to see it take shape.
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What’s in a Domain?
Just to alleviate any confusion among my tens of readers, I wanted to let you all know that I recently changed the official domain for this blog. Once it was near-earth.com, but now more. The blog’s new domain is nearearthobject.net, but the good part is that near-earth.com will still redirect to here, and I suppose probably will in perpetuity as I remain tethered to the GoDaddy pseudo-bureaucracy.
Why the change? First, I didn’t like having a hyphen in the domain. Imagine:
Potential Reader: Where’s your blog?
Me: Oh, it’s at near-dash-earth-dot-com.
Potential Reader: So, like, all as one word?
Me: What?
Potential Reader: So, you spell out near-dash-earth…um…
Me: No, it’s a hyphen.
Potential Reader: Okay, so, near, then H-Y-P…how do you spell hyphen?
Me: Actually, just go to the Huffington Post.
You see? With nearearthobject-dot-net, I just say it, and it makes sense.
And then there’s the whole Internet exchange thing. I couldn’t get (never could get) nearearthobject-dot-com, but I decided that it made more sense to go with dot-net, since this blog is many things, but one thing it is not is profitable. It is not commercial, the origin of the “com” in dot-com. So dot-net it is.
And as a side note, the old blog’s shortcut domain, BlocRaison.com, also points here, but I don’t know for how long. Also, since Apple is killing iWeb, my personal website, PaulFidalgo.com, will need to find a new host, which may mean, for a time at least, that this domain also points here.
All roads lead to this little blog. As it should be.
My apologies, by the way, for the sparse posting. Things are hectic, and I’m working on acquiring a new computing rig, which ought to inspire even more bloggery. Stay tuned.
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Facing Irrelevance
How many readers does it take to make a blog worthwhile? What constitutes a sufficient number of pageviews for a given post? The most obvious answer is that there is no line of demarcation; the act of writing is an end in itself. If I were to have a meaningful conversation with a single person, or even just have something good and substantive to say to an audience of one, would that not be enough?
And yet when it comes to writing for the Internet, those numbers feel like they matter. Outside the context of the Web, it would be unlikely that anything I wrote, for any reason, would ever be read by more than a handful of people. Today, even my least-read postings still garner 20 to 30 views or so. I don’t know how many of those folks are actually reading the content, of course. But often, I have posts that take in 100 views or more. But that doesn’t feel like enough. (Once, I was fortunate enough to compose a piece for Examiner that won over 70,000 views. I’ve never come anywhere close to that since, either in raw numbers or even in the amount of zeroes.)
I think it’s because the standard in my mind is that of the well-known blogger, the Web-based influencer who is asked to join panels at conferences, who is cited by the likes of Andrew Sullivan or John Gruber, whose posts seem to matter to the wider Internet culture at least to some degree.
But I know this is not the usual way of things. Most blogs — as with he vast majority of all other online content — are read by staggeringly few souls. In which case, the notion that even a smattering of people would take the time to consider one’s writings should be humbling, should be sufficient for all but the most insatiable of egos.
Well, I have to do some careful reading of my own ego-meter. I am trying to find value primarily in the creation of the work. But its lack of larger relevance is proving to be something of a weight on my will to produce it. Looking back, I think I may have put too much energy, too much thought, into my online identity, on creating a brand that might one day grow into something that had resonance beyond immediate friends and the occasional passerby. Perhaps that energy would have been better spent on producing more meaningful — and better — material.
Near-Earth Object 