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What value is there in blogging?

Well, I sup­pose that depends on who you are. Some peo­ple blog to make money on adver­tis­ing, some peo­ple net­work with busi­ness con­tacts or pub­li­cize them­selves, some peo­ple are look­ing to share pho­tog­ra­phy, etc.

I am a grad­u­ate stu­dent in phi­los­o­phy and edu­ca­tion who hopes to make a career, not to men­tion a well-ordered and suc­cess­ful life, out of the clear-headed explo­ration of ideas. Prepar­ing for this kind of career and life requires a great deal of prac­tice in read­ing widely, think­ing hard, and then say­ing some­thing coher­ent, novel, plau­si­ble and inter­est­ing about what you’ve read.

It seems to me that blog­ging pro­vides a good forum for prac­tic­ing those skills. Of course, one could read and write pri­vately, with­out pub­lish­ing to the web or any other place. But I think that hav­ing some read­ers makes one more account­able for engag­ing in the reading/thinking/writing process. Know­ing that one’s writ­ing will be read pro­vides extra incen­tive to get some­thing writ­ten in the first place and, more­over, to write some­thing coher­ent, novel, plau­si­ble and inter­est­ing. Com­ments from oth­ers can give you some idea whether you are ful­fill­ing those objectives.

The main con­cern I have heard raised about blog­ging is that it is some­how related to being nar­cis­sis­tic. This is a poten­tially seri­ous objec­tion to the prac­tice. Nar­cis­sism is what you would call a “thick” con­cept. That is, “nar­cis­sis­tic” has both descrip­tive and eval­u­a­tive com­po­nents. First, it describes that a per­son is rather self-absorbed or has an inflated sense of self-importance. Sec­ond, the term in its ordi­nary usage passes a neg­a­tive judg­ment on this per­sonal qual­ity. Com­pe­tent eng­lish speak­ers know that “nar­cis­sis­tic” has a neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tion, with nar­cis­sism some­times even ele­vated to the point of psychopathology.

This brings me to an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion fre­quently made in ethics. Some eth­i­cal the­o­ries focus on par­tic­u­lar actions — whether they are right or wrong, morally per­mis­si­ble or imper­mis­si­ble, when con­sid­ered alone. This would include stan­dard act util­i­tar­i­an­ism and Kan­tian­ism, if you hap­pen to know any­thing about those. But, other eth­i­cal the­o­ries focus on the more gen­eral ques­tion of how to live, or what kind of per­son you should try to become. This includes Aris­totelian virtue ethics, which I’m sure I will dis­cuss again later.

So, take the case at hand — blog­ging. The act-focused eth­i­cal per­spec­tive would have us ask: is blog­ging morally oblig­a­tory? merely per­mis­si­ble? or even morally wrong? I think this ques­tion is kind of unin­ter­est­ing. An eth­i­cal the­ory that held that blog­ging (in ordi­nary cir­cum­stances) is either oblig­a­tory or out­right wrong would be sus­pect, in my opin­ion. Prethe­o­ret­i­cally, it just seems obvi­ous that blog­ging is morally per­mis­si­ble, that is, morally optional. You can either not blog, or blog, and be in the moral clear either way.

The more inter­est­ing ques­tion is — what place can blog­ging pos­si­bly have in liv­ing the kind of life that is good for a per­son? Or, what place can it have in becom­ing a bet­ter per­son? This is where the nar­cis­sism crit­i­cism gets some bite. If blog­ging does cor­rupt the qual­ity of one’s life or the qual­ity of one’s char­ac­ter, then, from the moral per­spec­tive, it should be avoided.

There are two avail­able inter­pre­ta­tions for the orig­i­nal objection.

The first is that one should not blog, because peo­ple who are already nar­cis­sis­tic tend to blog, and so one would be reveal­ing a vice of char­ac­ter in doing so. I’m not sure what the evi­dence for this is. Surely there are some nar­cis­sis­tic peo­ple who blog, but with the huge amount of blogs that exist, there have to be coun­terex­am­ples to the objector’s con­jec­ture. And, even if it were true that peo­ple who are already nar­cis­sis­tic tend to blog, the solu­tion to the prob­lem would not nec­es­sar­ily be to refrain from blog­ging; the solu­tion would be to work on one’s nar­cis­sism. The nar­cis­sism, after all, is the inher­ently bad thing, not blogging.

The sec­ond inter­pre­ta­tion of the objec­tion is that blog­ging makes peo­ple more nar­cis­sis­tic than they were before. This, I think, is the more plau­si­ble of the two inter­pre­ta­tions. It’s easy to see why some­one would make this objec­tion. Per­sonal blogs do often seem to focus on aspects of their author’s lives, even minu­tiae that are unlikely to be inter­est­ing to oth­ers, and some­times con­tain self-aggrandizing con­tent, dra­matic plays for read­ers’ atten­tion, and the like. But, the objec­tion is over­gen­er­al­ized. A mature blog­ger who has a healthy per­spec­tive on her­self and her place on the inter­net, let alone in the world on the whole, needn’t fall into these unpro­duc­tive and maybe even psy­cho­log­i­cally inju­ri­ous blog­ging habits. In fact, get­ting feed­back from read­ers on one’s thoughts and one’s work could just as eas­ily be hum­bling as ego-inflating. I know that when I read the blogs of really smart peo­ple, I real­ize more than ever that I have a long way to go in my edu­ca­tion, and I’m under no illu­sion that my blog will auto­mat­i­cally be of equal or greater impor­tance than theirs. But remem­ber that every blog was once in its infancy. Peo­ple learn best by doing and, as I observed before, blogs are a good oppor­tu­nity to prac­tice aca­d­e­mic skills. It’s lit­tle won­der, then, that so many thought­ful peo­ple are giv­ing it a try.  Some of them are prob­a­bly nar­cis­sis­tic, but that’s pre­ex­ist­ing. If their nar­cis­sism shows through in their blogs, then either thought­ful com­menters will tear them to bits, or almost no one will read their blog.

Thus, I don’t see any com­pelling rea­sons to think there is any nec­es­sary con­nec­tion between being or becom­ing nar­cis­sis­tic and blog­ging. As such, blog­ging can have a place in the kind of life that is bal­anced and good for a per­son. Beyond being morally per­mis­si­ble, blog­ging can have some value, par­tic­u­larly to those inter­ested in shar­ing and devel­op­ing ideas. It can be a good way of cre­at­ing a pro­gram of read­ing, writ­ing and dis­cussing reg­u­larly, in a fairly low-stakes environment.

So, with all that said, I’m giv­ing blog­ging another try. Thanks for com­ing along for the ride.

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