Mukul Kesavan on blogging: Edition 2

First he said that they (and, by that he meant Indian men between 25 and 60) write only about Hindi movies, English books, foreign places travelled to and pseudo-secularism, and, offered some (rather forgettable) explanations too for their obsessions.

Next he faulted bloggers for their narcissism, obsessive fact checking, and derivative and self-indulgent writing.

Now, he is writing about the kind of blogging that is debauching writing:

A kind reader pointed out to me that the genre of blog writing I had described and criticized in last week’s column was best understood as bourgeois blogese, blogging devoted to opinion, random reflection and polemic. Typically, blogs of this sort consist of little editorials written by the blogger about the subjects that concern him with links to the writing that he likes or dislikes on those subjects.

It is this genre of blog that debauches writing. Here, the great strength of the form — the near-absolute freedom to say what you want — becomes a serious problem. Anonymity, instead of being a necessary invisibility cloak for the samizdat blogger, becomes, for our editorialist, a licence to ‘be himself’, which is always a bad idea because as a writer it’s one’s best self that’s attractive, not the self that rolls out of bed and begins to hold forth on the state of the world without brushing its teeth. In blogs that publish comments, anonymity turns into a ranter’s charter, where readers freed from all restraint and inhibition, turn threads into sewage.

Pretty soon the anonymity induced sewage is replaced by non-anonymous, “opinion-mongering”, “bourgeois” “monoculture” of blogs:

The successful bourgeois blog is the blog that assembles a large congregation of the like-minded. It’s a monoculture. Reading it regularly as an outsider is nearly impossible because it reads like a televangelist’s lecture: always with a message (the message could be anarchist, left wing, liberal, libertarian, conservative), with constant references to the enemy (the overarching state, lefties, America) and (this is the most unbearable part) endless self-promotion. The editorializing blogger is a walking advertisement for himself. Ironically, despite the drumbeat of derisive references to the MSM (the mainstream media), the self-promotion generally consists of references to articles published by the blogger in newspapers or (more rarely) books published on old-fashioned paper.

Of course, this time around, Kesavan does name names. After all that, of course the saviour is (no prizes for guessing correctly):

Fortunately, the company that has come to define both sharply defined search and targeted advertising, Google, has also pioneered the news aggregator site. Google News is, I think, the newspaper remade for the net. The aggregator site with special versions for different countries (like regional editions of a newspaper) is the meta-daily, which offers the reader the diversity of a newspaper (politics, sport, business, technology, the arts and entertainment) with the added bonus of dozens, even hundreds, of takes on the same piece of news. Its expansiveness is the perfect antidote to the claustrophobia induced by sustained blog-reading. The solipsism of the blogger is balanced by the mainstream media’s documentation of a world that a diversity of readers can share.

Probably, Kesavan is not aware that mainstream media could be equally fragmented; and, that newspapers (like Hindu, which is perceived to be left of centre–and, I was reliably told because N Ram happens to be a “bigtime leftie”, or, to take another extreme example, say, Samna) too are read by their own monoculture. Probably, also, Kesavan is not aware of the explosion of local dailies and how they cater to local public and report mostly local news (I remember Sevanti Ninen writing about a widow who advertised her cow in the local Hindi daily and got a few hundred rupees more than what she would otherwise have got). What is more surprising, Kesavan does not seem to have met people who read only sports, opinion, entertainment, or, even, letters to the editor column and nothing else in the newspapers — he seems to imply that since newspapers print all that, all the people who get them, are also reading all that! And, it is a real pity that Kesavan does not seem to be aware of blogs which are scholarly, with no axe to grind, and also report with a diversity that readers can share.

I do not know how many more articles on blog-bashing that Kesavan is planning to write. However, I think I have made my point. And, I promise the readers of this blog that this is my last rant on Kesavan’s views on blogging (lest he accuse me of living parasitically on his columns). To paraphrse Kesavan himself, reading his rants regularly as an outsider is nearly impossible because it reads like a televangelist’s lecture: always with a message (greatness of main stream media), with constant references to the enemy (blogs) and (this is the most unbearable part) endless self-promotion.

Tags: Blogging, main stream media, Mukul Kesavan, Rant