Still Blogging After All These Years
Five years ago today—so my wife Laura tells me; I had thought we’d reached this point a couple of weeks ago—this blog was launched. Since then, I’ve written 901 posts, totaling, I’m guessing, about a million words, which has provoked some 16,000 comments. Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, my posts are guaranteed to reach at least 30,000 people (there’s overlap in these audiences so I’m subtracting a good amount to try and account for that), and on a good day, anywhere from 10 to 20 thousand readers will come to the blog and read its posts there. I often cross-post at Crooked Timber, where I’m a regular blogger, or Jacobin, so the readership for any one post can be even higher.
I started this blog kicking and screaming. I had joined Facebook in late 2010 and instantly started writing mini-blog posts there on politics and culture. Often a lively conversation would ensue. Laura urged me to turn my Facebook jottings into a blog. I refused. What I wanted was an author’s web page. Laura, who’s a digital media strategist as well as a writer and editor, agreed to set it up. Only she set it up as a blog, which she had been quietly building over a few weeks on WordPress. Web pages were static, she said. If I wanted readers, I needed to write. Not just books or articles but blogs.
I remember my howls of protest. Why I was so resistant, I can’t exactly say, except that I feared that I was going to tumble down the rabbit hole of popularization and vulgarization. Every academic—well, maybe not every academic, but a lot of academics—wants readers but fears them. Or fears the reputation of wanting readers or having them. Academics worry about being seen as dumbing things down, as not being serious. If they forsake the rarified halls of scholarship, where monkish rules of long silence are punctuated by only the most periodic of speech acts, they and their work will be thought of as not rigorous.
That was the fear. I got over it. And I’m glad I did. Even though I had been writing for popular audiences for years—in venues like the New York Times, the London Review of Books, The Nation, and Lingua Franca—blogging threw me into a world of conversation of the sort you never really get in either academia or print media. The immediacy of the response; the unpredictability and range of the engagement; the depth and thoughtfulness of the comments; the ease of the back and forth; the willingness to interrogate first principles; the presence, almost material, of the audience: this was the kind of conversation I had gone into academia—and had moved to New York—for. This was the kind of conversation that, except for my union days in grad school, I had always wanted and never found. And here it was, on the internet.
Since then, I’ve gone on to write about a range of topics, some of them with a focus and intensity that I never would have employed were it not for my readers. My work and interests have changed in all sorts of ways because of blogging. Lately, I’ve been talking quite a bit about public intellectuals (a term I’d long eschewed and been wary of): not only their will to create an audience but the role of the audience as an independent and autonomous co-creator. This blog—as well as Facebook, where I increasingly try out smaller bits and pieces of what often becomes a blog—is what, in part, I’ve had in mind.
So on this, the five-year anniversary of my blog, I want to thank three people.
First, Laura, who not only pushed me, kicking and screaming, to do this, but who has since been my consigliere in all things digital. Laura often is the first reader of my posts, in draft. She either gives me the green light or says no, not this one, and thereby spares you all of a great many false starts. She’s an inerrant stylist, with an eye for the fullness of a sentence and an ear for the flatness of its fall. She has a sense of taste, which I always depend on. And despite being a rather reserved and retiring person, she has a feel for the fight.
Second, Remeike Forbes, who spent nearly a year working behind the scenes on the aesthetics of the blog in 2014, before we launched this new design in February 2015. I hesitate to say much about Remeike or what he did because when it comes to talking about aesthetics, I’m hopelessly out of my league. All I can say is that Remeike’s aesthetic vision and imprint is so strong that I cannot think about this blog—its contents, arguments, and sentences—without seeing it as he sees it.
And, last, you, the reader. I don’t always respond to your comments, but they often lodge somewhere in my head. Worrying me, bothering me, inciting me.
When I began this blog, in 2011, blogs were supposed to be on their way out. New bloggers were supposed to be incapable of finding or creating an audience because the market was already saturated. Too much supply, not enough demand. (I didn’t know any of this at the time. In my usual bumbling fashion, I was pretty clueless about the whole thing. I only found out later.) That hasn’t been my experience. This blog has acquired new and more readers every day. Not, I’d like to think, readers in search of a hot take or a partisan broadside, but readers interested in history and theory, in the laden-ness of political experience.
That makes me proud—and grateful. So, thank you, again, dear reader.