This recent thread on academic blogging is a fascinating one which, unfortunately, I was only able to skim because, though I do spend a lot of my time reading & writing, I am unable to do so in a more...speculative fashion. It strikes me that that alone is the the lovely & privileged way academics—at least tenured academics!—get to spend their time.

Maybe I'm wrong.

There are many many good points brought up in the thread. A single person couldn't possibly comment on them all. But I'd like to offer my non-academic gloss on two of those points:

INFORMALITY // It shocks me that there is any debate about the possibility of writing formally on the web. It's simply impossible to do for any extended length of time -- that is if you hope to maintain an audience. Web content must & should & does tropism toward informality. Look no further than Natalia Cecire's contribution to the aforementioned thread. She is obviously very intelligent; but inevitably, what begins with a line of well-reasoned arguments ends with a joke about French cooking.

Plain and simple, the nature of hyperlinks and computerized information glut makes the internet a hyper-competitive place for prose of any sort, and an exhausting one. There is an inherent demand in the medium that that prose be "catchy," that the prose delivered in that medium demands people's attention, that this prose attack ideas with knives both lethal and editorial. It is not a medium for leisurely thought or ideas that develop slowly or at length.

THE GENERAL PUBLIC // Again, that there is any debate that the general public would have any interest in this blog in its current form strikes me as odd.

Skimming the headlines of the posts currently on the home page there are lots of posts about abstractions -- "Race, Ethnicity, Brains"; "Religious Moderation"; "French Political Culture." Abstractions are not going to grab the world's attention when even extended commentary on highly specific events and works of art are having a hard time.

I am refering here, to the fact that traditional arts criticism has seen a relatively quick decline in the internet era. By which I mean, arts criticism in the Pauline Kael mold; hell even in the Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel mode. To put this point more bluntly: In the internet era, no critic has emerged with the authority to take on a movie like Terrence Malick's "Tree of Life" at length. Ergo, why would anyone expect Arcade might develop an audience for more rambling, more leisurely commentary on life itself?

Do you want to see what criticism looks like on the internet? Bang here you go: http://twitter.com/#!/discographies

(Note: I wouldn't, for a second, argue that this development is a bad thing per se.)

This is not to say people are not interested in discovering and experiencing new art that expresses new ideas. I'd argue that there is more interest in experiencing novel artistic production than ever before in the history of the world. (Overstatement is a blogger's friend.) But I think commentary on art and, by extension, conceptual writing in general, is at a low ebb. (I'm sure this is a glass half-empty view. I'd love someone to contradict me!)

To turn away from my glossing, and dig into the meat of the the thread under discussion, Natalia presented a most clear-headed notion on what this blog should aspire to. I want to re-state it here so everyone can savor it for a second. (Savoring other people's ideas and recapitulating memes being something that the internet is actually quite good at.)

"To me the great virtue of blogging is that one starts to see the patterns emerge, so that, for instance, I've written several throwaway posts in the past (they may have involved photos of sad-looking dogs in Halloween costumes and the tag "wtf") that have turned into a substantial research interest with deeper connections to my current book project than I at first realized."

If Arcade has any hope as a useful forum, it demands that the posters here not worry about their reputations; not worry about consequences; that they do not overthink their posting. Which, I'd argue, they currently do.

Fact is, this site is currently prissy, specialized and hermetic -- especially compared to the control group that is the rest of the internet. I say this as someone who happily finds a lot intelligent writing on the web, albeit mostly about technology & business issues. I'm not computer programmer and only a self-taught businessperson yet I find reams of welcoming, smart & engaging - ahem - content on those topics, content that is completely coherent to the non-specialist. Arcade is, by contrast, pretty impenetrable. And I'm someone with a four year tenure spent in an ivy-laden academic institution! What must this blog sound like to, say, my mom, or your mom. (I guess it depends what your mom was an academic?)

If posters here want to prove themselves an evolutionary step above most academic discourse on the web, they will have to start embracing a different way of pursuing that discourse in this forum. Or, apologies for the double-entendre, a second life if you will. They must become humanists using the methodology of scientists; they must act as investigators looking for patterns in a jumble of ideas & data; they must not self-edit and fret about sharpening those ideas into well-reasoned points before they are expressed here.

Online conversation is a debating contest timed with a stopwatch; it is not a place for academic review and second-guessing yourself.

Rant over.

The internet is an excellent forum for rants. :)