One of the promises of the Internet, and blogging in particular, is that it will lead to stunning intellectual debate and all will walk away from the table with a full belly of wisdom. Others have scoffed and said that there’s a whole lot of crap being discussed at the table. Others, like Cass Sunstein, say that the conversation is very one-sided and simplistic.
Brad deLong asks, "Why are there so few gold-standard high-quality internet
intellectual communities around? And are there others of equally high
and consistent quality of which I am unaware?"
He points to Unfogged and Making Light as two blogs that have high level chats, and pulls out a nice comment from Doug on this blog.
So, where else are the smart people hanging out?
Apt. 11d 
I don’t have a lot of patience for comment threads, to be honest. The only ones I read with any frequency are Crooked Timber’s and this blog’s. I find comment threads hard to follow and full of extraneous inside jokes I’m not interested in, especially at places like Unfogged.
I’ve found the WSJ Juggle threads to be somewhat interesting and relatively troll-free.
Also, I tend not to want to get involved in a whole lot of backpatting/rah rah-ing, so when I do post an argumentive/challenging comment on a blog where I’m not known for being one of the community, I have to go through a whole process of negotiating the community’s own boundaries, which is tiresome.
That said, I love to debate, and Brad is right that it is hard to find places to debate with others of similar intellectual ability. Buffy fandom was the last place I found a lot of really good debate (present company excepted, of course).
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i recommend the genx forum at http://www.newcafe.org
this started as an online bulletin-board type community sponsored by utne reader in the mid-90’s. it has now morphed into a self-sustaining group of dedicated folks who are, well, the smart kids in the room hanging out and talking about all kinds of stuff.
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Well, I hang around here (and at 1/2 changed world) because the issues are the ones which interest me, and people are consistently civil. Partly that’s the tone set by the leader of our salon (thankyou Laura) and partly I think it’s because there are a reasonably small number of regulars, so you DON’T FEEL LIKE YOU HAVE TO SHOUT OR ATTACK TO BE HEARD.
Another nice thing about blogs, and this one in particular, is that posts have some life: if you think of something which responds to a post from six months ago, you can drop a response onto it, and someone else may find it interesting and respond.
DeLong has a tendency to delete comments he doesn’t like – one of his threads on race/heritability/IQ went in directions he didn’t approve of, and some of his commenters became nonpersons. So I tend to be less interested in his place.
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I’m like Dave — I also post here and at half-changed world (and a few other blogs where I am a regular, and all of which are ones in which small numbers of people comment — say 10 comment threads).
I’ve gotten to know the community of folks who post here. People are civil, and that’s something the blog owner can mediate. But, I think that the size of the regular commenter group also matters to me. One could try to enforce civility (but I think it’s hard to do that without skewing the discussion). So I don’t think enforcement works as the audiences grow. one person’s reasonable debate on race, can easily become offensive to someone else. I think real civility comes of thinking that you are in a community where you want people to respect you. If you’re doing a fly-by comment, it doesn’t matter what you say.
To me that means that a blog has to remain small in order to maintain my interest. There are some bigger blogs that are not terribly uncivil, but they tend to devolve into not really having people who disagree (Dooce, So Close come to mind as examples).
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dave s. and bj,
I think you guys are right about size. A lot of the heavy-traffic blogs are more like an airport bar than the corner pub.
I spend a lot of time on blogs, but this is probably the only one where I’m a regular commenter. Elsewhere, I might read obsessively (like at thehousingbubbleblog.com), but I rarely comment, for a lot of reasons (lack of expertise, etc.), but partly since I don’t want to comment where I can’t commit to following the thread.
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As to the question:
I think the smart people hang out at niche blogs rather than Greyhound-terminal-type blogs
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There’s a cutoff of about 20 to 30 comments, after which it takes considerable effort to have a good conversation going. It also takes a mix of people who hold divergent views, but who are willing to engage and to take the others’ views into account. To say nothing of people, in reasonably close time zones, with the spare time and interest.
The blogger also needs to be present in comments, at least until there is a crew of regulars, and generally even then. As Teresa Nielsen Hayden has written, “If you want [complex, nuanced, civil discourse] to happen, you have to give of yourself. Providing the space but not tending the conversation is like expecting that your front yard will automatically turn itself into a garden.”
Actually, TNH’s set of notes is worth reading in its entirety.
Anyway, apropos of not very much, we’re moving to Tbilisi next month. After which I hope to both blog and comment a bit more. But if it happens that any of y’all here know anyone there, help us connect!
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Tblisi. Oh my. Why? A friend of mine is an expert on Georgian politics and has lived there in the past. Shall I connect you guys?
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Doug’s citation of TNH’s comment about the need of being personally committed to making good conversations happen online is dead-on, and is reflective of both Amy’s comment (“…partly since I don’t want to comment where I can’t commit to following the thread”) and my own experience. I like long, thoughtful threads, but I’m not nearly responsible enough to try to make them happen, at my own place or elsewhere; I’m just too undependable a blogger and blog-reader. Sometimes, with the topic of choice and my inclinations coincide, I’ve been part of some really good debates at Crooked Timber, here, LGM, and a couple of others…but those times, unfortunately, are few and far between.
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“Tblisi. Oh my. Why?”
My better half will be directing the regional office of a German foundation. So off we go!
A little more deeply, after 10 years of Germany, I’m ready for new pastures. If I wanted to climb the corporate ladder, I could have stayed in the States and done it with rather fewer handicaps, so I’m more than ok with going freelance again. And I did my thesis on Nagorno-Karabakh, so I’m at least reasonably familiar with region. And less deeply, there are mountains there, too, so we get the change without having to give up hiking, climbing, etc.
“A friend of mine is an expert on Georgian politics and has lived there in the past. Shall I connect you guys?”
Yes!!
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I think you’re on to another good point, Russell; namely, that different blogs are likely to have different tempos, and that there will be some self-selection in debates according to the pace that people want. More than 90 percent of the time, Unfogged is too fast for me, plus I’m in the wrong time zone for their debates. Every now and again, I’ve chimed in from the late, late shift; or there’s been a mini-colloquy among their European regulars. (Making Light is also problematic for me, in that threads can suddenly acquire 200 comments during my nighttime, and there’s no way I have time to wade through them, especially when they’re good.) In contrast, Laura posts semi-daily, and the commenters about the same; or the discussions at In Media Res unfold in their own sweet time, with the writers clearly taking time to reflect. Faster is not always better.
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Gimme an e-mail address, Doug. Julie is writing a book right now on Georgian politics; maybe you can help each other out.
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doug.merrill@fistfulofeuros.net should do the trick. Or try merrilld@georgetown.edu
Hope the sp*m filter doesn’t eat this comment!
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“Faster is not always better”
No, faster is NEVER better. Even when fast is good, it would have been better slow.
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…the discussions at In Medias Res unfold in their own sweet time, with the writers clearly taking time to reflect.
That’s very kind of you to say, Doug; I consider it high praise. I can probably count on one hand the number of decent exchanges which take place on my blog in a year’s time, but when it happens, I take a great deal of pleasure in it. Thanks very for having done your part, here and there, over the years.
…faster is NEVER better. Even when fast is good, it would have been better slow.
Harry, that is so true. Of course, it’s also true that sometimes if it doesn’t happen fast it won’t happen at all, but that doesn’t mean that what gets done or said fast is automatically therefore worth being said or done. As I’ve fallen into my own on-again-off-again routine in blogging, I’ve found that there are a great many posts that I pass over, electing not to read or comment on, because I know that whatever it is I think to be worth contributing couldn’t be posted fast enough to have any sort of impact on the thread.
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“No, faster is NEVER better. Even when fast is good, it would have been better slow.”
Your wife is a lucky woman, Harry.
Oops, sorry, that comment drifted over from Unfogged, where we talk that way sometimes. Carry on.
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Doug, I was thinking the same thing. Maybe I *would* be a good member of Unfogged. 😉
I really resist the idea that commenting on a blog means you probably have to be part of a community. What I find with any type of community is that a kind of groupthink starts occurring, and I hate groupthink, which is why you’ll find me a little prickly sometimes. I’m just trying to maintain my individuality. 🙂 But I have been arguing politics and tv fandom online since 1992 (Prodigy! GEnie! NVN! Usenet! The “olden” days), and I never found a group of people debating/discussing issues that didn’t calcify in some way. I’m on a Politics discussion e-mail list that I’ve been on since 1994, and basically, the same discussions happen again and again. I love these guys, but I have to back out every now and then because it gets wearisome.
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I was thinking the same, too. Glad you said it, Doug.
I enjoy the unfogged commentary, but I don’t have the reflexes to participate much myself. And I’m in the same time zone.
I can’t even participate as much as I would like in my own comment section. The kids and the job suck up precious blog time. And it does take up some time finding material for the posts.
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“The kids and the job suck up precious blog time.”
The family and the employer don’t always see it that way, oddly enough…
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Wendy, I think maybe the debates on your e-mail list get a bit repetitive because that’s how politics is. If things weren’t so repetitive, it would take too long to decide how to vote.
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