You Can Get A Lot Out Of Either Blogs Or Books

At the risk of preaching to the choir hear I want to highlight this argument of the value of blogs by Alan Jacobs:

To say that a magazine, or a set of magazines, or even a series of blogs are the chief instruments of your intellectual formation is not — or should not be — a shameful confession. A lot depends on the quality of your reading. If you read an intelligent and active blogger over the course of a year, say, you are likely to be reading more than a book’s worth of that person’s words; and while you won’t be getting the benefit of tracing a single argument through lengthy development — something relatively few books offer anyway — if you are an attentive reader you will learn a great deal about how that person’s mind works, how that mind encounters and assesses the many provocations that any smart person faces in a year. That kind of reading can be a useful intellectual education . . . in some fields.

But not in all. In my field, literary studies, I would say that you could (theoretically) get an education in criticism by reading smart blogs, but you can only get an education in literature by reading literature. And that means learning to reckon not just with short works — lyric poems, essays, short stories — but with great big things: novels, plays, epics. In literature the book-length work is central and irreplaceable.

The still common reputation among people who don’t read blogs is that it really is just a bunch of middle-aged men, in their pajamas, in the basement of their mom’s house ranting the liberal schtick or the conservative one and although that’s true of many many blogs there are also ones that due very serious reporting and ones that engage in equally serious meditations on topics like economics. So, as Jacobs says, the regular blog reader is not actually reading partisan tantrums. Oftentimes they’re reading some of the most stimulating minds today at their best.

–Daniel Strauss