Michael Kinsley on bloggers

Last week Michael Kinsley threw an idea out into the blogosphere and asked for responses. This week, he writes about the response:

What floored me was not just the volume and speed of the feedback but its seriousness and sophistication. Sure, there were some simpletons and some name-calling nasties echoing rote-learned propaganda. But we get those in letters to the editor. What we don't get, nearly as much, is smart and sincere intellectual engagement -- mostly from people who are not intellectuals by profession -- with obscure and tedious, but important, issues.

Why the difference? Length, for one. I'll be hard-put, next week, even to summarize my own argument, let alone discuss those of others, in the space available to a columnist. Letters get even less space, if they are published at all. Certainty that what you write will get posted is surely another factor. It's nice to know you're not wasting your time. Ease is important, too. You can send your views electronically to a blog in less time than it takes to find a stamp, let alone type a letter.

Well, duh.

This ties in very nicely with a post I'm working on about the role of private intellectuals in revitalizing our democracy (or at least in mourning its demise...) through blogging. Private intellectuals are people who think about public policy, politics, 'issues', philosophy, the meaning of life, and all that stuff on, amazingly, their very own time. Living the examined life and all that. They are likely to be paid to think in their day jobs, but to think about things like UML diagrams, brand visibility, bond markets, databases, or other things that are important only in so much as they fuel the economy and provide a paycheck (and, if you're very lucky, health insurance...). But while some company is leasing their brain, theoretically at 100% CPU time, they actually have a lot of other processes going on in the background, thinking about the stuff that really matters. And they come home and blog about it, or blog about it at work when they are supposed to be working on a slide presentation, and maybe their blogs don't get much traffic, but in having to write down their thoughts they get to organize them, they make sense of the information overload caused by too many newsfeeds, and maybe some readers read about things they wouldn't otherwise read about, and think about things they wouldn't otherwise think about, and so the blogging of private intellectuals, we amateurs, is a kind of grassroots movement to make serious thinking into a national pasttime, so that we can become again, perhaps, a nation of informed citizens.

I'll have more to say on this later. Maybe I'll even modify the above Faulkner-esque run-on sentence into a more readable paragraph.