Ed Cone points out the observations by Elizabeth Edwards about the weaknesses of many political debate formats. Admittedly a general weakness is well known, but Edwards, below, shows that we can name the particular weakness if we care to do the work:
In truth, these formats serve best the candidates with the least developed ideas, for a simple sound bite might be all they have to say about an issue. In fact, in one debate where a candidate was asked several follow-up questions on a particular issue, the series of responses was embarassing for the absence of flesh on the bones and the candidate was left simply to repeat the elements of the previous sixty-second answer in a different order.
(T)he candidates are not encouraged by the media to be steady, statesmanlike, disciplined, visionary -- all the qualities we hope our President to be. #
Those of us who place some hope in weblogs to help strengthen and enrich political and other discourse in our country need to scrutinize the structures of influential blogs in the same way that she has scrutinized the debates.
We are pulled in two directions, for example, by something as simple as the length of our posts. We are obliged to attract and keep readers by the liveliness of our writing, and often enough we get some assistance there by being brief. Yet ideas take time to explore, plainly. We turn to aggregators to sample the work of dozens of writers a day, yet we can hardly do more than sample most of them as it is. We have other jobs and we are writing, to some degree, in our limited spare time. Most of us don't have time to do much research and may not even think of ourselves as researchers. In other words, you would pretty much expect the content of weblogs to be poor, based on these and other constraints and customs.
People who mention that the content is poor are sometimes sniped at for their troubles, I seem to recall. On the other hand, I recall that folks in the Education College sometimes talk about best practices -- maybe we need a catalog of best practices and another annotated listing of practices that don't qualify (and why they don't). That is, we need to name the strengths and weaknesses of this kind of writing clearly enough to change our bad patterns. (Even if the organizers of most political debates will probably not follow that example.)
As someone who has participated in online dialogues for years (previously in newsgroups, now in blogs), I have found there is an element on online dialogue that is inhibiting to political candidates (and surrogates) and maybe also inhibiting to productive analysis generally -- and that is tone. There is an entertaining edge to online dialogue. In fact maybe there is an imperative of an entertaining edge -- for it is easier to scroll past a dull online entry than even to reach for the remote to change the television channel. Maureen Dowd would be good at combining content and edge, but we are not all blessed with that talent or that license.
Even naming the entries on a weblog or a forum has become a form of marketing -- "come, read me" -- so the writer, blogger, poster feels compelled to whip up interest with a teaser and then feels to compelled to try to live up to the tease. (Of course, like many Hollywood trailers, often if you have read the title of the entry, you have read the best the author has to offer.) The compulsion can not be satisfied either -- because each day the last day's offering becomes stale and a new teaser is needed. Maybe even Maureen Dowd could not keep pace.
And for many bloggers and commenters, it is not about dialogue, it is in fact about marketing -- in my present world, a candidate, and ultimately in every field, our point of view. The desire then to influence aggravates these structural shortcomings -- more tease, more edge, more readers, more baiting responses so there are more comments -- and with all of this, the elements of productive dialogue become less and less useful.
But I don't despair. Serious blogs, and Lessig's comes to mind first, have really become a community of thought, analysis, and exchange. Is that the model? I don't know. I suspect there is not a single model. All I know is this comment is already too long for the medium and with each new sentence I lose yet another reader.
In a fast-food age, to reach for a new thought you sometimes have to risk losing a reader, yes?