Not As The Scribes

Just last month, Joseph Rago of the Wall Street Journal sent out a battle cry for ink-and-paper journalists everywhere to decry the very existence of blogs. His subtitle claims in Joseph Conrand’s words that weblogs are “written by fools to be read by imbeciles.”

Many in the theological world have experienced the sense of “blog mob” Rago ragged on. One writer becomes obsessed with one book on the history of the interpretation of the history of thinking about Stanely Hauerwas’ interpretation of thinking about writers who once imagined a peaceful world through their interpretation of the Bible. A craze is invented, dies, and no one is really the better for it. Though, no doubt, Amazon.com has about forty less copies of whatever book Hauerwas had in the warehouse that week.

Rago, writing about the way blogs affect political commentary and its depth (or lack thereof), penned some words that could easily be applied to the theo-blogosphere:

This element–here’s my opinion–is necessarily modified and partly determined by the right now. Instant response, with not even a day of delay, impairs rigor. It is also a coagulant for orthodoxies. We rarely encounter sustained or systematic blog thought–instead, panics and manias; endless rehearsings of arguments put forward elsewhere; and a tendency to substitute ideology for cognition. The participatory Internet, in combination with the hyperlink, which allows sites to interrelate, appears to encourage mobs and mob behavior.

Adam is right to call this phenomenon in the theoblogical world Protestantism run a muck. But what if it’s already on the way out?

If it is, I think we have reason to celebrate. After all, there are good reasons that it takes time to get published, and there are good reasons that certain publishers are more trusted and respected than others: NOT EVERYONE IS A BRILLIANT BEACON OF INTELLIGIBLE LIGHT!

Myself included.

This guy is predicting the beginning of the end of the so-called blogging revolution. Well, not that blogs are going to disappear altogether. Better actually: we’re becoming less obsessed with blogs by the minute.

Reports of blogging’s demise are bosh, but if we’re lucky, something else really is going away: the by-turns overheated and uninformed obsession with blogging. Which would be just fine, because it would let blogging become what it was always destined to be: just another digital technology and method of communication, one with plenty to offer but no particular claim to revolution.

Bring out the band and clear off the streets! Perhaps after a parade and some drinks we can go back to reading dusty books in quiet libraries with only fleeting occasions for electronic communication about things best discussed over coffee in the afternoon, the theo-buzz from blogland having subsided into the theoretical equivalent of a dull roar.