SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND

Patricia Mathews-Salazar
On Blogging and Thinking About Blogging
April 21, 2009

Two issues have intrigued me most while reading the blogs for this week: access to the digitized information and its reach, coverage, but also the boundaries we may need to establish with other aspects of, not just academic, but life in general.

SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND

Corey Robin
On Blogging
April 20, 2009

I’ve come away from this year of blogging with a much greater appreciation of how difficult it is.  I don’t know how the best bloggers manage to toss off so many words, so fast, on so many different topics – and with such panache.  They may get a lot wrong, but they get a helluva lot right.  It takes me far too long to write these posts, and I know the length and style of these posts are ill suited to blogs (as is the phrase “ill suited”). 

SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND

Andrea Khalil
On Blogging
April 17, 2009

For those who want to lament the rise of the blogosphere and the demise of the newspaper, unfortunately whether we like it or not it has changed and will continue to change the way that news is delivered, opinions are circulated and even the way scholarship is produced. It is an unstoppable and unending wave that is already hitting the sand.

SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND

Andrew Bast
Blogs as Pamphleteers, Riding on an Anomaly
April 16, 2009

The most romantic way to think about blogs today like the Angry Arab, Daniel Drezner, George Packer's Interesting Times, or Simon Johnson's Baselinescenario is to hold them up as the pamphleteers of the Internet age. It's democratic. Hundreds of thousands, millions, (more?), of voices sounding praise, dissent, and bold new ideas into the public arena. Thomas Paine egged on the American Revolution with "The American Crisis" and today, if you've got the brilliance and the writing skills to convey it, the world is yours to change.

SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND

Tina Harris
On Blogging
April 16, 2009

I will be narcissistic.  The types of blogs I most like to read are the narcissistic ones – the kind that read like a personal diary of everyday life, the cathartic kind (to borrow Mehmet’s phrase).  It’s sort of a cathartic voyeurism – I check to see what strangers are up to, what amusing things they’ve seen on the streets, what relationship issues they are going through, or what kind of bathroom tiles they are putting in.  I particularly like the blogs of cabbies and waiters.  I also read mp3 blogs, cartography blogs, blogs on Chinese & Tibetan politics, blogs on new Japanese gadgets, blogs on old films, blogs on South Asian grassroots movements, and so on.  I pick and choose, get led to one link, and then another, and get completely carried away.  Politics mix and churn with informal personal accounts: a cabbie, for instance, discusses an encounter with a racist passenger and commenters suggest organizations he can contact.  A blog written by an environmental rights protestor in northeast India recommends a new Bollywood film we must all see.  In terms of my own writing, I occasionally contribute to a couple of (mostly music-related) blogs.

SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND

John Brenkman
The Guru and the Pundit
April 15, 2009

Once upon a time, in the early 21st century in the midst of what seemed to be yet another of those centuries’ “revolutions,” this one wrought by the Internet, a university (as Final Learning Goal was then known) staged a debate between a Guru and a Pundit in the quaint form of the cyber-exchanges that in those days were called “blogs.” Gurus were enterprising commentators on world events who drew on their extensive (or minimal) expertise in some field of knowledge in order to forge a sharply delineated, rigidly upheld worldview which they expressed in pungent, vivid, often inflammatory rhetoric; they came to be called Gurus because the main effect, if not goal, of their “blogging” was to build an audience of followers who were daily stirred to embrace, or at least delight in, the continually sharpened, ever purer worldview that the Guru “blogged” and to jump to his defense whenever he was criticized. Why the followers felt that the Guru needed them to defend him is not clear; why the Guru himself continued to write in a manner that repeatedly and inevitably elicited such defenders is even less clear. (Past-Recorders have determined that the origins of some such need for impassioned communication among likeminded people can be traced back to somewhat earlier phenomena like leftwing sectarian political groupings, feminist consciousness-raising, rightwing radio talk shows, and evangelical ceremonial gatherings, all of which are succinctly, definitively explained in the most recent update of Final Learning Goal’s Cultural Memory Bank, filed under the heading Ancestral GroupThink.) Meanwhile, the Guru’s opponent in the debate was a Pundit. It is not easy to explain Pundits either.

SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND

Mehmet Kucukozer
Blogging as a Catharsis
April 14, 2009

I started reading and participating on blog sites — which is also, as I would argue, blogging – on Middle East politics in the late nineties due to the frustration I had with much of the mainstream media on the topic. I felt that the kinds of perspectives I held were largely ignored. If someone once said, “I read to know I am not alone,” I blogged to know that I wasn’t alone. I identified with the Angry Arab’s viewpoints when I first read him on Spielberg’s Munich when it was sent to me through an Arab Studies list serve.

SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND

Agnieszka Kajrukszto
On Blogging
April 14, 2009

I have never read the blogs we are discussing. Now that I had the chance to look at them, I find them equally frustrating -- one for being overly formalistic, the other for not being formalistic enough. I guess that I dislike blogs in general, although I read a lot of them. I do often find them to be exercises in shallow self-promotion and ego boosting. I am conflicted about the uses and misuses of both the internet and blogs. As I am assaulted from all direction by electronic communications and tend to check my multiple emails often and read many very different blogs (but not regularly), I also lament the loss of time and opportunity to indulge in reading a dusty old book. Still, finding an intriguing blog is like finding an amazing diary in an attic of some house you’ve just moved into.

SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND

Ilgin Yorukoglu
On Blogging
April 13, 2009

Some traffic of comments, questions, and a fruitful discussion! I am out of New York for a few days already with a very limited access to the internet- amazing to realize how much and what you can achieve without checking your emails religiously or jumping from one online journal or a newspaper to a blog or any other website. It is surprising to realize, actually, that one can manage not only to survive but also to produce. Something. But, then, one usually wants to share what has been produced- and to some extent, this desire to share might be narcissistic.

SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND

Michael Busch
On AbuKhalil and Drezner
April 10, 2009

As’ad AbuKhalil raises an interesting problem in his discussion of the academic blogger when he notes that:

“I view my role in the classroom non-politically, so I make an effort (as difficult as it is) to keep my political views outside of the classroom. I believe in that, and the running joke among my students is that I don’t acknowledge the existence of my blog, although my students—or many of them—wind up finding it anyway…”

SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND

Moustafa Bayoumi
On AbuKhalil and Drezner
April 10, 2009

So here we are, blogging about bloggers who are blogging about blogging. My problem is that I know, simply by my own intuition, that I’m not such a good blogger. Blogging can be many things, but even after these many months, I don’t yet feel at home in this genre of writing.

SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND

Lee Quinby
On AbuKhalil and Drezner
April 9, 2009

Both of these blogs were new to me. Part of the question I had in mind when reading the blogs themselves and, more particularly, the reviews each blogger wrote for the seminar, is whether I would likely return to either one in the future. Based on what I have seen thus far, although both AbuKhalil and Drezner are both highly knowledgeable about their respective fields, not so much. Of the two, Angry Arab News Service was the most useful insofar as it did act as a source of focused information of daily news events regarding the Middle East. As AbuKhalil indicates, his site provides coverage that is largely absent in mainstream Western journalism. So I can imagine checking his site about a specific incident to gain more coverage. Drezner’s site struck me as mostly self-promotional, guiding readers toward longer pieces he has written or works by like-minded colleagues. The shortcoming for me was that neither site provides much beyond polemics. There was just too little room for the kind of dialogue that gets beyond the point of predictability of tone and response.

SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND

Ashley Dawson
Arise You Digital Serfs

April 9, 2009

There are all sorts of issues that the rise of the blogosphere raises.  How, for example, are our brains changing as a result of reading relatively brief, informally organized electronic postings rather than newspaper articles that stick to traditional journalistic protocols?  But I want to broach a broader set of questions: what’s the impact of the digitization of knowledge production and dissemination, how does it relate to the commodification of scholarship and the university during the neo-liberal age, and what sorts of liberatory potential, if any, does network culture offer?