The New Agora

So I’m blogging again. I say that with a present participle as if I am now back in a constant state of blogging. The thing is, blogging began to feel a little too much like navel gazing. I mean, I just talk about myself, which I find to be a dull topic.

A week or so ago, the staff at NPR’s Morning Edition were trying to get Daniel Schorr to sign up for a Twitter account. He said, "It really is another generation. I'm agape as I learn about how people can communicate with the outside world. It somehow reminds me ... of something in ancient Greece, the agora, the marketplace. You come out and you say things at the marketplace and everyone can hear. And every person now seems to be a network."

However, he was quite resistant to it. He asked why people can’t just sit and listen to a President speak anymore without letting their thumbs fly over phone keypads the entire time. He asked why people twitter. Tweets came back within seconds.

bdmckeown: I tweet to circumvent the usual obstacles to staying in touch.

susanellingburg: I tweet for the same reason I read — to know I'm not alone.

mat: No offense, but that's kind of a dumb question. Rephrase as: Why do you communicate at all? Just one more method of doing so.

ultrafastx: because talking to oneself is generally frowned upon these days.

thc1972: why do you go to a good cocktail party? Conversation, viewpoints, gossip, jokes, interaction

MarilynM: for conversation, community and connection. (there's also a lot of humor here.) :)

ckuns: Twitter is the new "water cooler" ... where you read the things you have to know but wouldn't find out otherwise

dirkfitzgerald: I tweet because I am might be missing out on the largest (and possibly) most interesting conversation ever.

EvaCatHerder sent in this tweet: "Given Dan Schorr's long history w/the evolution of news media, what does he think we are losing in web-based media? Gaining?"

"What we are losing is editing," Schorr said. "I grew up and nothing could be communicated to the outside world that didn't go through an editor to make sure you had your facts right, spelling right and so on. Now, every person is his or her own publisher and/or her own editor or her own reporter. And the world is full of people who are sending out what they consider to be news. It may be, it may not be, it may be made up and it doesn't matter anymore. That, to me, is the worst part of this. The discipline that should go with being able to communicate is gone." (NPR)

It reminded me of a comment my beautiful wife made back when we were dating in college. She had just been witness to a long, drawn out circular argument among several communication majors in her dorm. As we walked to dinner, she said, “Communication majors must spend all of their time learning to communicate and none of it learning to listen.”

And this past week, I was trying to convince about 100 teachers to sign up for classroom blogs because of the success I was having in my classroom with them. Many were not even sure what a blog was. “The word ‘blog’,” I said, “is short for ‘Web log’. It’s like a journal; a diary. But instead of writing in it at night and locking it up and hiding it in the night stand, you publish it on the internet for the whole world to see and you let them write in it.”

To which one teacher said, “And why do I want to do this?”

Daniel Schorr and I don’t agree on a whole lot, but I think I agree with him on this. His view was fairly balanced. Sure, it’s amazing that the right to publish now rests in anyone’s hands. But now we’re shouting our heads off. We’re all going out in the marketplace and yelling our stories, and our thoughts, and our ideas, and our vulgarities, and our insults, and what we think is news, and who is listening?

My wife and I were at a nice restaurant a couple years ago and a group of teenagers occupied the table next to us. They all had earbuds in their ears and were hooked up to iPods. One person pulled out the cord from the iPod and say, “Listen to this: I love this song.” Ten seconds of the song would play before the amateur DJ would switch to another song and then another and another. Soon they were all doing it at about the same time. No song got more than 10 seconds of air time. Who’s listening?

Watching these teens, my thought was “They don’t have the capacity to pay attention!” I remember buying a CD and bringing it home. Some aunts and uncles and cousins were there, and they were curious about my purchase. I put it in, and we all sat in the living room and listened to the entire album. Can that happen anymore? Should it?

John Stonestreet—a man that graduated from Bryan College with Marcy and I—came from Colorado to speak to our church this morning. He talked about culture and how Christians have a responsibility to be active in understanding culture, to uphold art that is excellent (not low culture) and true and noble. He referenced William Jennings Bryan, the man whom Bryan College is named for. Bryan was a three time presidential nominee, though he never won. He was a skillful orator who would talk for three hours without amplification to crowds of 5,000. Tell me that would happen today! John told us something that surprised me, though. He said, “Attention span is a choice.” Pay attention.

I wrote in an earlier blog that I often don’t know how I feel about something until I write about it. Writing is reflective and it is helpful to me. I wrote in another blog that I am writing for myself, not for others. (If that’s true, why am I publishing online?) There is something about the formatting and the published-look of blogging that makes it fun to write. And I do like it that I know of five people who check this blog, one of whom I am related to, two who are friends in real life, and (wildly) one in the U.K. that I’ve never met (Hi, Katie!) So I am guilty of adding to the shouting-in-the-marketplace noise. And to be fair, I love reading the blogs of these people. I like to hear their thoughts and their ideas and their fears and their hopes. When I check their blog each week, I am disappointed when nothing new is up.

Perhaps I should have started with a present perfect : “So, I have blogged again” instead, because I have. And, I will again. But it might not be this week.