Theories of navel gazing in the holy huddle – The God Blogs

The other day The Evangelical Outpost ran a link fest. Joe Carter tends to do that from time to time, as do many of us, it’s a way to boost one of the measurable currencies of a blog, and it was done with a Marine collegiality – a hail and hardy cuff on the shoulder that of course generated the expected interest of those cuffed and those that felt left out. It’s a classic example of blog management 101 for those that like managing.:^)

In a recent post (Royal Rumble in Godblogdom) I attempted to mock our current reward system by including a number of the behaviors that Godbloggers should discourage — a concern with individual gain of traffic and links, focusing on a trivial topic of concern only to other Christian bloggers, purposefully being divisive and uncharitable, etc. The results were just what I expected: it was one of the most-linked, most read posts I’ve had all year.

Now this is not meant to shame those who read and/or linked to the post. I hope that they valued it as a light-hearted, satirical swipe at problems that are plaguing our corner of the blogosphere. But when this post—sloppily tossed off in a half-hour of typing—receives more attention than more serious posts that I spend hours researching and crafting, it definitely makes me wonder if I’m not wasting my time.

He follows up with a piece on blogging (Kerr’s Folly and Christian bloggers) using a market model – an article from a 1975 Academy of Management Journal by Steve Kerr entitled: “On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B.”

Carter concludes evangelical blogs fall into the ‘sports’ category of Kerr’s categories and goes on to look at reward – individuality. It is well worth a read. Management style is about achievement and reward, and the tones ring true to many in the evangelical online holy huddle.

One comment really stands out, from Catez in New Zealand.

I don’t think it has to be either/or Joe. Mostly I blog “seriously” but I do like to let my hair down under my helmet once every so often – especially near the end of a week.

I recommend wading through Kerr’s article, and I do recommend reading Joe’s post and the comments underneath.

I’d like to look at faith blogs not from a measurable achieving management style of what, but from a sociological perspective of why. We don’t always understand why we do things, and we don’t do them in the isolation we think we do. With the mediated voyeurism of the internet we move far beyond a managable management model.

Carter’s key points about evangelical weblogs - using Kerr’s sports category - are:

We hope for. . . community But we often reward … individuality
We hope for. . . eternal perspective But we often reward … focus on the trivial and ephermeral
We hope for. . . wisdom But we often reward … foolishness
We hope for. . . depth and breadth of interest But we often reward … shallowness and narrowness of concern
We hope for. . . unity But we often reward … division
We hope for. . . faith, hope, and love But we often reward … doubt, pessimism, and uncharitableness

I’m going to try to parse down about a 3 thousand word academic paper: Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog and I’m going to attempt to do so in bite sized chunks. And hopefully understandable chunks, as Joe Carter did with Kerr’s sports category. I think we’ll see ourselves, others and our blog environment here.:^)