Why I Blog

Michael Benton is organizing a special issue of Reconstruction on "Theories/Practices of Blogging" and has asked for bloggers to contribute a post on why they blog. This is my off-the-cuff take.

I initially started blogging for very modest reasons, and those reasons remain to this day -- to collate and save pertinent links, and share those links with others. I do this in the belief that the truth is "out there," but you often have to work hard to find it. At a very basic level, blogging enables and encourages me to sift through material, keep up with current events, and stay politically aware.

I tend to keep personal information off the blog, largely because I don't find it relevant or terribly necessary to share with others. The material I post is supposed to speak for itself. For the most part, I think it does. My expectation is that readers judge my credibility based on the content on offer. I blog mostly to share and document. I'm not terribly interested in opining, although that's sort of implicit in much of what I post. More often than not, though, the opining tends to be voiced less through me than through third party links.

At an intellectual level, I blog because of my interest in the social construction of knowledge. I'm interested in how ideas are disseminated; how they're imbued with meaning or importance; how narratives are forged; how culture is shaped by power, and vice versa. Blogging is, for me, quite simply about playing some kind of regular, consistent role shaping and molding social discourse. I’m under no delusion that what I do here plays a major role in the larger culture, but the thinking is that every little effort, or utterance, matters.

My major inspiration for blogging tends to come from critical pedagogy, particularly theorists like Henry Giroux, who has argued persuasively over the years that the navigation of everyday culture is where people have their most profound pedagogical experiences. In other words, people learn the most about the world via their interactions outside of formal educational institutions, precisely in those situations when they're not supposed to be "learning" anything. It is my belief that we, as citizens and educators, broadly defined, desperately need to come to grips with the implication that culture is, above all, about pedagogy.

At bottom, if we’re concerned about culture and education -- and their political dimensions -- we need to better understand how and why people traffic in certain ideas. We need to better interrogate where information comes from, how it is constructed, and to what end. In short, we need to better engage media. For me, blogging is probably the easiest and, as far as I can tell, the best way of doing that. At least at the current moment.

It's worth noting here that my understanding of media has been heavily influenced by Chomsky and Herman's "propaganda model," namely their notion of how varying ideological, economic, and logistical "filters" shape what is deemed to be important, relevant information. Generally speaking, information that tends to justify the current order, or the dominant orientation of power within and around media nodes, tends to be reinforced, reified, and promoted. Information that does not tends to be downplayed, marginalized, or at the least inadequately contextualized.

I tend to blog under the assumption that a lot of good, important material gets reported, but doesn't get the attention that it deserves. Thus, my blogging is, to a large degree, about documenting and highlighting those issues, trends, opinions, or stories that I feel do not get "filtered" properly. It's about providing a platform for material that deserves more than a passing glance.

Maintaining a blog can be taxing, especially if you try to post consistently and live something approaching a "normal" life. I will admit that blogging has lost a bit of its allure over recent years for me, for a variety of reasons, but I plug on. On many occasions I've come very close to shutting up shop permanently.

To this day, I have doubts about whether the time I invest in putting the blog together is worth the effort. It's been hard for me to grapple with the fact that as I've blogged (since 2002), political discourse in this country seems to have only gotten worse. I often ask myself whether my energies would be best directed elsewhere. This is something that I will no doubt continue struggling with in the future.

Still, as an intellectual, political, and cultural exercise, I think I have pretty good reasons for blogging. Modest, perhaps, but good ones.