I dunno. Jacobs may be expecting much more from the blogosphere than it can deliver 90 percent of the time. I for one don’t want to engage in “important” discussions all the time. Occasionally, yes. But most of the time I want to keep it light. I’m all for serious escapism in the blogosphere.

Bloggedy blog’s response to a delightful essay decrying the limits of blogs by English professor Alan Jacobs over at Books and Culture, Christianity Today.

ar arrr arrrr!
I dunno. While I certainly am idealistic about blogging and blogs, I don’t take the structure of it as seriously as some. Professor Jacobs:

And sometimes it does; but often it doesn’t—or rather, the conversation just gets started and then peters out before it can really become productive. And this happens not because of inertia, but largely because the anatomy of a blog makes a serious conversation all but impossible.

Professor Jacobs did cite an instance where an english discussion occurred he felt comfortable participating in wound up in .pdf (big deal in academia!) Then he jumps into the fray about US political blogs, and again, the lack of serious discussion.

You expect this sort of thing, you have learned to scan right past it in search of genuine reflection. Eventually someone—maybe the author of the original post, maybe someone else—responds to your claim, negatively let’s say. You quickly defend your position, explaining it in more detail because more detail reveals that your view is not subject to the criticism that has been offered; but now you have to go to work, or pick up the kids from school; you’ll check back later to see what further response you have elicited.

Mostly true. Most of us don’t have to make a living teaching or publishing. Most of us don’t live or die by the criticism our ideas elicit. I have to commend Professor Jacobs for making some money writing a genuine essay about his blogging experience, I really do! But I can’t stop laughing or empathizing either.

On many blogs the comments to a given post are “closed” after a few days—no one is allowed to make further comments—usually because that helps to prevent the accumulation of comment spam, but also because so many threads degenerate into name-calling that the blog administrator has to shoo the belligerents along to another venue.

True, mostly. Depends on the blog, the blogger, the belligerents, the bellecose and mostly the spam.

Professor Jacobs goes on to discuss the architectural deficiencies of blogs, particularly comment sections. He is quite eloquent about verbal abuse, trolls and opinion.

What strikes me clearly about his essay are his high initial expectations in the excitement of discovering blogs. We all have them in the flush of newness of a medium. Jacobs says good bye to his expectations. 

- it gets tiresome to peek in at the website every day ( well no - I don’t find that personally, it gives me an opportunity to at least pray for the blogger)

- Spontaneous communities of committed, thoughtful people testing their ideas against one another—iron sharpening iron (well, sometimes)

- blogs could provide an alternative venue where more risky ideas could be offered and debated, where real intellectual progress might take place outside the System. (I think they do! Just not systematically)

- the particular architecture of the blogosphere is the chief impediment to its becoming a place where new ideas can be deployed, tested, and developed. (not everyone blogs for the same reasons, why would we expect that?)

- anatomy of a blog makes a serious conversation all but impossible.(depends on the blogger and the conversationalists)

- you have learned to scan right past it in search of genuine reflection ( this must be so difficult for teachers and people accustomed to serious ideas, standards of achievement and being listened too, simply because it is true you do a lot of scanning. What fascinates me is, as much drivel as there is, it is still individuals placing it there. And if it’s my blog receiving ‘drivel’, how then shall I respond?)

- your view is not subject to the criticism that has been offered ( again, Professor Jacobs has my sympathy, blogs are not a classroom in any sense of the traditional, but it doesn’t mean we don’t learn)

- asking him or her to take a look at this new evidence (it’s the internet, instant, spontaneous and a place that reminds me of what Gore Vidal said about the US - The United States of Amnesia.  Blogs move quickly and move on while often collecting great information and ideas.  But blogs are not a structured class in a semester)

- no law of the blogosphere is more important—though also more widely ignored—than “Don’t feed the trolls.” (Depends on the blogger and what they perceive as their goal and their concept of free speech. I’ve learned great communication skills from stellar bloggers on how to feed trolls)

- as vehicles for the development of ideas they are woefully deficient and will necessarily remain so unless they develop an architecture that is less bound by the demands of urgency (it is not an either/or proposition)

- The arrogant, the ignorant, and the bullheaded constantly threaten to drown out the saintly, and for that matter the merely knowledgeable, (welcome to the commonness of humanity:^)

- Many’s the time I have found myself hunched over my keyboard, my hands frozen above it, trying to decide which of two replies to make: the one assuming that my interlocutor is morally compromised, or the one assuming that he is invincibly ignorant (some of us just are invincibly ignorant and with millions of blogs out there, walking away isn’t going to bring on the apocalypse. Takes a wise man to walk away sometimes)

- blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought (ah professor, it depends on the bloggers and the readers)

I willfully snipped lines from his essay Goodbye, Blog, in the hopes you’ll head over and read all of it.
It’s an opportunity to think about expectations, about how you as a blogger see the world through the internet, how you handle discussion and disagreement. And I wish the essay had comments, I’d be interested in seeing what people that don’t read blogs have to say.

One time my expectations of blogs fundamentally shifted was when the first GodBlogCon was announced a year ago. When I went over to do some research on participants, I looked at about 80 attendee blogs.
They were Hugh Hewitt blog clones, and to this day I cannot figure out why that was almost a shock to me.
In a few days I’ll be passing my fourth blogday, and I’ve watched us in our holy huddles, our tribes and our uniqueness. I’ve seen every kind of platform, been to all corners of the blog world, but the structure, tone, look and tribal cliche of that blog cluster genuinely surprised me. 
Mr. Hewitt was a speaker at that conference, he is a professional Christian and employee of Salem Media, and wrote a book about blogging for US Evangelical Republicans. With the exception of a couple of quite uniquely designed and written blogs, they had the same architecture, they were cut from the same cloth, and for the most part plastered with ads, and pretty much talking about the same things. 
The only thing I could think was they’d all read the same how to manual, but that’s not proven or a given. When you google ‘Hugh Hewitt inspired blogs’ an honest to god page comes up. Maybe I’m not imagining what I saw.
When I have a few hours to spare I’d like to go back to that moment of internet time and look at those 80 or so blogs again. I want to understand why they looked like the equivalent of a fast food chain, why they carried all the advertising, and whether more of them found their own voice and a wider blogosphere. 
Maybe individual and unique is not what this cluster of bloggers were attempting or choosing to be, I wonder after reading Professor Jacobs essay, if that was one of his lost expectations.
I hope they found what many of us find, what I’ve found - blogging can be a lot of fun, the world is at your fingertips, it’s an opportunity and a gift, and the vast majority of people you meet in your blogging journey are amazing and wonderful people; people that to me, are living books in their own right.
Blog on!

connexions has an excellent response to Goodbye, Blog