Oh. My. God. I heard about the Ann Althouse-Garance Franke-Ruta blogginghead video earlier in the week, but hadn’t had time to watch it yet. Thanks to Dan, I see that the video has sparked a major blogosphere hoopla, so I had to check the video out in my office. My office computer’s volume sucks, and I’m basically squatting on the floor with my ear up against the CPU in order to hear everything properly.
I’ll blog about it later, but you should all check it out in the meantime. Check out all the links on Dan’s blog for more juicy gossip.
Apt. 11d 
AA has a very fun blog with great comment threads, but she’s also recently had a nasty troll infestation in her comments, which I hope is subsiding now that she is taking a firmer hand with the people who were just hanging around and insulting her. The funny thing is why she let things get so out of hand, given that she doesn’t take personal criticism well.
My feeling is that you only have to take one “conservative” view to get tagged as a conservative.
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Can we just say “insider baseball” and move on?
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Wow, eye of the beholder time. AA’s blog is fun? What, like sticking rusty nails through your bicep muscle is fun? I find her one of the meaner, more unpleasant, self-absorbed and more two-faced bloggers out there. It’s got nothing to do with ideology, but she’s exactly what I don’t like about many blogs: no self-criticism, no reflectiveness, no grey areas, no thoughtfulness, preaching to the converted. It’s an echo chamber blog (of which there are plenty on the right AND the left).
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She’s great when she’s not being a diva or talking about people being mean to Ann Althouse, which is fortunately about 95% of the time. I like the variety and the frivolity, the artsy cafe photographs, the Madison photographs, the reality show blogging, and what she does with NYT culture reporting. It’s a very smart, feminine blog.
I think I would avoid using the term “echo chamber,” since it often signals projection by the person using the term.
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The photos are lovely, yes, but she is a diva much more than 5% of the time! She is obsessed with who quotes her and whether she has been treated right — meaning, adequately fawned over. It’s pathetic. I’ve never encountered someone who sees so much of the world as out to get her. I’d say, don’t flatter yourself, Ann; but self-flattery is one of her specialties.
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Give me a break, Amy. I don’t often toot my own blogging horn, but I think if there’s one thing I don’t do, it’s make echoes.
Tell me when Althouse isn’t being a diva. That’ll be almost as big an event as hell freezing over.
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I’m not saying you do it. I’m just saying that the term has taken on a life of its own and you don’t necessarily want to be associated with it. All too often “echo chamber” simply means, this blogger fails to agree with me and I resent it.
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One problem with the term “echo chamber” is that one is almost inevitably going to be much less sensitive to shades of ideological diversity on the other side, so one may be missing out on the real tensions and debates going on, because one disagrees with both sides. NRO’s Corner is ideologically extremely diverse, but I’m not sure this really registers on someone who is not conservative. The atmosphere of AA’s comment threads has gone down a lot with her troll invasion, but in the past, I’ve been very pleased with the wide range of posters on the blog.
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I do want to be associated with it, because I think it’s an accurate indictment of the way a lot of bloggers operate. Let’s take la diva Althouse as an example. She’ll cite Glenn Reynolds as confirming something she said, Reynolds will post something that says, “Indeed”, someone at NRO will repeat it, and then la diva Althouse will say, “Wow, lots of people agree with me on this one.” Look at her comments section: it’s either people who are spewing trollish hate at her or it’s fawning sycophants who feed her encomiums like they were cookies. It’s all circular and self-confirming and utterly without contact with anything remotely resembling a conversation that has intellectual content. Plenty of blogs on the left have the same character: they never come up against anything approaching a difficult argument where you have a genuinely heterogenous community involved in the discussion and where the host or original poster appears open in any sense to persuasion, self-reflection or critical thought.
If the site is nothing more than a partisan call to the troops, I suppose that’s ok. But I expect, and think I have a right to expect, something better from an academic’s blog, ANY academic’s blog, if it wants to associate itself in any way with academic stature.
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It didn’t used to be like that at all–the comment ecosystem used to be a lot more like 11d’s or janegalts’s. It’s really sad that things can go bad so fast.
“I expect, and think I have a right to expect, something better from an academic’s blog, ANY academic’s blog, if it wants to associate itself in any way with academic stature.”
I don’t think you really get what AA is trying to do with her blog posts, and I think it’s ridiculous to call althouse.com a “partisan call to the troops” when so little of what she does in the election off-season is political, and an even smaller percentage of that is partisan. Think of all those dozens of posts she’s done on American Idol, The Apprentice, and all those other reality shows. Not to mention all the beautiful photography of funky Madison people, shops, cafes, and scenery, or her posts on some of the issues that come up here at 11D. If you bleeped out every political post on her blog, she’d still be an amazingly productive blogger.
It’s not an academic blog, it does not aspire to “academic stature” and I think AA has been vociferous in arguing against the kind of purity that you are asking for.
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She’s an academic, and frequently refers to her role as an academic. I think you miscount the number of times she makes political or partisan comments even in posts that are seemingly about other things, or in posting on other blogs. I think she claims to be against partisanship and then consistently makes astonishingly partisan, not to mention nasty and petty, remarks about a wide variety of people and subjects. It’s what you actually do that matters, not what you claim to be doing.
Here, try this one. “Well, Scott, I see a tiny little image that looks like this: d. I was under the impression that that was a picture of a tiny little prick, and I thought it was you. I’ll take your word for it that I was wrong and that despite your loathsomeness, you’ve managed to find other little pricks who are willing to associate with you. I have corrected my post to indicate that it was not you. Now, have you corrected your vicious stupidity, you pathetic little man?”
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She’s an academic, and frequently refers to her role as an academic. I think you miscount the number of times she makes political or partisan comments even in posts that are seemingly about other things, or in posting on other blogs. I think she claims to be against partisanship and then consistently makes astonishingly partisan, not to mention nasty and petty, remarks about a wide variety of people and subjects. It’s what you actually do that matters, not what you claim to be doing.
Here, try this one. “Well, Scott, I see a tiny little image that looks like this: d. I was under the impression that that was a picture of a tiny little prick, and I thought it was you. I’ll take your word for it that I was wrong and that despite your loathsomeness, you’ve managed to find other little pricks who are willing to associate with you. I have corrected my post to indicate that it was not you. Now, have you corrected your vicious stupidity, you pathetic little man?”
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That was pretty bad, but I try to judge people on their best work. Now, what is the political side of Gwen Stefani and self-asphyxiation?
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I can’t comment about AA’s comment section, because I almost never check it out. I wander through her blog every now and then, but I’m not a daily reader. I keep tabs on her, but we run a quiet, little blog here and I feel more at home at other quiet, little blogs. I did have a problem with the whole Jessica Valenti-boobs thing, mostly because it was so ridiculous.
Dan Drezner brings up in his post that blogging brings out certain behaviors. I think he’s right. Other than quiet, little blogs, it is difficult to get a good back and forth on issues. (BTW, thanks to bj and jen for their comments in the last post. A good, civilized chat.) The bigger the audience, the more likely that the comment section is going to degenerate to the “go, girl” comments or “you ugly, old b*tch” comments. I imagine it’s hard to not let the compliments go to your head and to not let the criticisms wear you down.
I think the blogosphere rewards women bloggers for vamping it up. Divas attract hits. Look at Wonkette and other bloggers that shall go unnamed at this moment. A lot of blog readers are juvenile boys who get their thrills from a two-dimensional, female blog personna. Lindsay Beyerstein gets a lot of points from me for not doing that. She’s cute, but she doesn’t flirt with her readers. Ditto for Jane Galt. But they are a rarity.
I wrote a really dumb post a year ago about having red hair and the supposed “red headed” personality. That’s continually one of most popular posts, because a ton of people are googling “red head and personality.” A good number of blog readers aren’t tuning in because they want to delve into important political debates or even talk about the latest TV shows. They are their kicks by imagining that they are talking to some hot, smart, saucy broad who is really dying to go to bed with them.
I’ve never met AA. So, I have no clue if she is her blog. But I could definitely see how blogging could push one’s personality to an extreme.
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tim, mouth dropping to the ground. I can’t believe she wrote that.
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Hi. I’m one of the liberal bloggers who’s given AA such a hard time (she once called me “insolent,” as a matter of fact).
What Scott Lemieux has said about all this stuff is accurate. AA likes blogfights, which is why she’s always involved in one. And whenever one of her targets proves able to defend themselves, she pretends she’s above it all.
I admit to a longstanding grievance with Althouse. Althouse once took a comment from a friend of mine and cited it on her blog as evidence of a sexist liberal vendetta against her. But this comment was in fact written by someone who at the time knew nothing of Althouse and was really referring to a sexual discrimination lawsuit she had filed — and won, against all the odds. Althouse was essentially accusing a professional woman, an impeccable scholar, a person of the highest character and qualifications, who had directly suffered from very real and very savage sexism… of sexism.
Althouse was politely informed of her error and provided with evidence. She responded as if all this were a further insult.
I’m sorry, but Althouse is very willing to be personally hurtful, and will not ever admit a mistake. I don’t condone abuse, but Althouse has earned every bit of the scrutiny and even contempt she’s received. S
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Dan’s right, of course. We’ve joked on the internal mailing list about what post would bring the largest number of comments, and we could certainly write those all the time if that’s the kind of spirit that moved us. Collectively, though, we seem to think that our blog is about something else.
On the other hand, even bloggers who got in early and benefit from path dependence *and* post regularly tend to have certain schticks. Dan and Selma Hayek, for example.
Having a good comments section is an art, with a certain amount of applied science. As a rule of thumb, new thoughts about a blog post almost never arrive after somewhere between comment 30 and 50. If the thread is interesting after that point, it’s because the conversation has gone in a new direction. The only two exceptions I can think of are Making Light and Unfogged.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden has a useful post (URL on request) on having a good comment section. The presence and (though she doesn’t say so, it’s implicit) disposition of the blogger in comments is crucial. Second is the development of a number of regulars who become a part of the general atmosphere, and who contribute to keeping up standards. Expecting good comments without getting involved, she writes, is like expecting a meadow to develop spontaneously into a garden.
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Another jaw dropping post here. I’m rethinking my middle-of-the-road attitude towards the Althouse controversy.
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the impression I have of AA is of a mean, spiteful, vicious and disingenuous person. This is gathered from reactions to her blog rather than the ding an sich, I must confess. But read for example:
http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2006/09/lets_take_a_clo.html
Nasty, just plain nasty.
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I could barely understand that post about Levy and Drezner, partly because I don’t think it has much substantive content beyond, “Me Me Me Me Me ME ME ME people mean to ME people mean to ME Me Me Me ME ME ME people mean to ME”.
But look at the comments section that Amy esteems. It’s like reading the dictionary entry for “sycophancy”. It’s like training wheels for becoming part of a royal court or for being an aide-de-camp to a psychologically unstable dictator.
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It sure is nice when Althouse doesn’t do politics but talks about American Idol instead..
Makes me want to make a vlog of myself playing World of Warcraft after drinking four glasses of wine. “I’m playing World of Warcraft. Oh, whoops, I stole aggro from the warrior. Hang on while I use feint.”
Actually, no, it doesn’t make me want to do that.
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I said (a couple of times) that the comments have been good in the past, but have fallen off lately. Is that clear?
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By the way, if you go through my comments, you’d be able to pull out the following criticisms:
1. AA let her trolls get out of hand.
2. She doesn’t take personal criticism well.
3. She’s not great when she’s being a diva or talking about other people being mean to her.
In other words, I think that she’s vulnerable to criticism, but has some very strong points that I don’t think that she’s getting enough credit for. Think, for instance, of the national productivity boost caused by her blogging Desperate Housewives, the Sopranos, and Big Love. Thousands of people (including myself) were spared having to watch the shows themselves, thanks to her Cliff Note versions. Thank you, Ann Althouse!
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snort. Vblog your video game, Tim. Come on. I’m going to Vblog myself cleaning the bathroom. Maybe I’ll show everyone a close up of the grout. But I’ll drink and muss up my hair the whole time.
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Can I vlog (or is it “vblog”?) myself grading papers? (“This guy, see, I won’t show his name of course, that would be unethical, but I’ve already told you it’s a he, haven’t I?–oh well, you know, you can tell by the handwriting, but anyway, this doofus–excuse me, this student–he can’t to save his life distinguish between ‘their’ and ‘there,’ I mean, you can see it, there, I’ve circled it with a red pen.”) I don’t drink, but sometimes I get my grading done really late at night, and I’m tired and wearing sweats, so I still might be able to pull off the disheveled thing.
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One of the things that partisans do is mock prominent individual members of their opposition. They always have. In the past they’ve done so in their clubhouses or at partisan dinners (Jefferson-Jackson day or Lincoln day depending on the party). Now they do so on partisan blogs and it’s much more public. Althouse is a right-wing partisan. So she mocks and attacks left-wing partisans and she gets mocked and attacked by left-wing partisans in turn. Politics, in the small sense, as usual. Groups strengthening their group identification. Nothing to see here. Move on.
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