In an unfortunately heated, yet dismissive comment, a criminal defense lawyer of some substantial experience and accomplishment wrote of her true thoughts about blawgs:

It wasn’t unfortunate because it revealed her true feelings about blawgs; feelings which are no doubt shared by many others who think that any fool with a keyboard can set themselves up to be a pundit of some worth.  It was unfortunate because it was gratuitous, wholly unrelated to her purpose for commenting, and fundamentally misguided.  I reacted to the comment with some disdain, having grown tired of the responsibility to explain life in the blawgosphere to everyone who doesn’t understand it but won’t let their ignorance stand in the way of expressing their opinion.

This post, however, isn’t directed at the individual, which is why I don’t link back to the comment or identify its author.  She’s been duly chastised, and will no doubt dismiss my response as still more blathering.  That’s the beauty of being dismissive, as it alleviates one from any responsibility for being wrong or learning what’s right.

That said, the comment serves well as a launching pad for a better understanding of what blawgs are, and can be.  Better to light a candle than curse the darkness.

There are blogs that meet the commenter’s expectation.  But we rarely see them, because they offer nothing of value.  For some reason, people unfamiliar with the blawgosphere are apt to believe that every blog, no matter how vapid or fascinating, is read by millions of people.  To their mind, there is some vast group of disconnected people (none of whom they know) that spends their days and nights fussing with the digital world.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that there is little to be gained from disagreeing with what someone says in a blog, especially when they know very little about what they write. It also shows the sadly impersonal communication that we have become used to because of computers, e-mail, texting, instant messaging, etc.

The obverse is the lonely old woman, surrounded by only the few people with whom she interacts and agrees, deciding that everything electronic is evil, and that the hordes of people who have forsaken real human contact for a technology driven life portend the death of intelligence.  These are both caricatures.  Few people spend their days and nights tapping away at keyboards, though there are certainly some and they tend to be as dislikable online as they are in real life.  On the other hand, only a fool is so totally dismissive of the future, of the tools that enable us to do things that we could only dream about a generation ago.

Blawgs are very much a by-product of the confluence of technological advancement and good, old fashioned community.  There are no hordes of avid blog readers out there consuming everything written by every fool with a computer.  As any blawger will tell you, readers are both fickle and hard to come by.  The vast majority of blawgers have very few readers, some consisting of no more than immediate family and the occasional Googler who has yet to figure out how to frame a decent search.  When their trees fall in the forest, there’s no one to hear.

There are thousand of blawgs, but only a handful that have any significant readership.  The blawgosphere can be quite harsh, with peer rejection requiring nothing more than the click of a mouse button.  Nasty comment are better than no comments.  At least someone is reading.  But most have the deafening sound of an empty room.  For a variety of reasons, readers have decided that their time is better spent elsewhere.  The blawg will fail of its own accord.

Then there are blawgs of remarkable content, thought and substance.  The Volokh Conspiracy comes immediately to mind, reflecting the best of what the blawgosphere has to offer.  Invariably thought-provoking, informative and challenging, it’s unlikely that any conversation the commenter might have with cronies might approach the value of reading VC for a day or two.  And not surprisingly, that explains why Volokh has tens of thousand of daily readers, most of whom have real lives just like my commenter and still choose to spend a few minutes of their day with a blawg.  Lawyers, just like my commenter but who have chosen not to dismiss an entire genre of communication, see great value in reading a blawg.  They are not all fools.

The facile combination of dismissing the substantive value of the blawgosphere as worthless, the individuals as egocentric blathering idiots crying for attention and the views with which she disagrees as inherently wrong, allows the commenter to smugly wallow in ignorance, confident that she’s not only missing nothing of value, but that her thoughts stand above the fray.  The world is passing her by, and she takes satisfaction in holding firm in her belief that nothing worthwhile has happened since LBJ left office.

Being something of an old codger to many of the young whippersnappers who frequent the blawgosphere, I understand the resistance to change, the reluctance to hop aboard the bandwagon with every new-fangled fad or gizmo.  I’m still uncomfortable with Lexis, believing that researching with a stack of books in front of me means that I’m likely to miss something important.  But it’s just foolish to ignore change, to dismiss it out of sheer ignorance.  I refuse to accept every new development that teeny-boppers find alluring, but I similarly refuse to just ignore it and justify my ignorance by calling it all stupid. 

An old fool is worse than a young fool.  Better not to be a fool at all.  There will always be people who reject that the world around them is changing, and that some of the change is useful, valuable and for the better.  They don’t have to agree with all of it, or like any of it, but to deny it is just plain foolish.