Dennis Fox’s Weblog

Until recently, I rarely read blogs except for my friend Eliot Gelwan’s. I had little time just to surf and read, and too many blogs were so poorly written, superficial, predictable, or nasty that coming across them wasn’t particularly rewarding. (Yes, I know that plenty of people detest my own writing and views — my biweekly newspaper column sometimes draws pretty angry responses, as do some of my academic essays. But I usually try to rant literately, aiming to provoke reflection rather than numb it. I do think this blog, like many others, is too wordy, because my postings don’t undergo enough revisions. Word limits are useful.)

My blog-reading habits changed a bit after beginning this blog last August, which I had hesitated doing for several reasons. I knew it could become tremendously time-consuming. I was unsure how to balance analysis with spontaneity, as I’ve noted before. And I preferred to write for print and online outlets that attract more readers and sometimes even pay, like the newspaper that runs my column (now that I’m on leave from my academic job, money matters more than I’d like).

When I decided to write regularly about my planned visit to Israel, I tried to interest several media sites in publishing a series of articles, but none agreed. So I figured this blog would provide a way to begin, as well as an incentive to stay focused. Of course, as I feared, I quickly started writing about other topics as well and will likely keep doing so. But so far I’m glad to be experimenting with this, even if not many people are reading.

To attract readers, and maybe even some feedback, I added this blog to a few web directories. On one site, a political blog directory at eTalkinghead.com, bloggers apply to be listed within one of several categories, including conservative, moderate, liberal, independent, libertarian, religious, and humor. The site’s goal is to assemble a range of perspectives. Almost 300 bloggers are listed so far.

I grappled with the liberal category — defined by eTalkinghead as “left-leaning and liberal” — because my political perspective is more radical than liberal, and “left-leaning” just doesn’t seem the same thing. Despite common assumptions within the traditional American “liberal to conservative” political spectrum, radical does not mean “extra liberal” so much as “not liberal” in important ways (I’ve touched on different aspects of this distinction a number of times in material posted on my website). But since the other categories were equally inaccurate or uninformative, I went ahead with the left-leaning liberals and then suggested to the site’s owner that a new left-of-liberal category might help attract additional bloggers and extend the spectrum further.

Political self-definition is a tricky matter. In addition to the problem of defining terms, I’ve discovered that many of us think we know what’s really going on because we’ve read the right books, talked to the right people, taken the right courses, or had the right experiences, or because we think we have superior intelligence or empathy or the like. When I did my dissertation in the 1980s, I interviewed people who had written letters to the editor about political topics. Right, left, or center, most of the people I spoke with thought their political awareness was higher than others’.

That’s what I see when I read blogs all across eTalkinghead’s categories. Mine too, I suppose. Yet I’d like to see more of us demonstrate our political and value commitments without being so nasty or simplistic.

It would also help if we stopped making so many typos.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 7th, 2004 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Blogging, Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.