The short answer is: I don't have comments because I don't "blog"; I write. As much as I try to I can't bring myself to view this, this little thing full of words and images that you are looking at, as a blog, and especially as space for personal thoughts about my daily life. Lots of strangers read our blogs. Some people have the resilience to make their personal life a public thing, but Derek and I really made a choice early on that our blog was more for writing essays than for sharing personal things. Whenever I do try to write soundbites, they end up becoming lengthy essays. Try as I might, I am just not a good "blogger"; but I am a decent writer.
Case in point, here is the lengthy answer:
I have about 4 different websites for different things, and have been writing a web journal since 1998, before the days of blog software. There was never an option for comments in those days. (Blogger didn't offer them till a couple years ago.) And when they were an option, I never added them partly out of habit but mostly because I didn't like having a public dialog on my website, which was really all about my writing. Despite the fact that you can now comment on every major newspaper article, blog, picture, video and the internet is now built on this ability to have public discourse, I still like the idea that one can read some kind of writing without having to encounter a community's commentary about the writing. I think it would be weird if a novel had a page for comments that everyone instantly read as soon as they were written.
Reason #1. The conventions of blog-dom are becoming too rigid.
Yes, comments and blogs build community. But before blog was Blogging, a thing with its own conventions and expectations, it was actually a creatively free space where a person or group of people made a website or a web-journal out of a labor of love (and it was labor, hand-coding every single page, as I remember all too well!) There were no "templates" back then. You had to make it up yourself.
As an artist, I like to play with forms. Like any other form, the form of "blog" is not a static thing to me. Most people seem to accept its conventions; you set up a blog, you have a number of entries on the first page, with dates, and titles and comments and a sidebar for all the other blogs you like. This is now a well-recognized form that was started by Blogger and Movable Type. But as any artistic-minded person likes to ask, what else can you do with it? What if you had no front page? What if there was no sidebar? How can you deconstruct it, change it, play with it? No form is so static, especially virtual forms, that they it can't be completely and creatively changed.
You can do whatever you want with a canvas. It's not math. Poets are still playing with the sonnet form after 500 years and doing new things with it. The blog is a much more fluid form on an already fluid media, the internet, so why are its conventions so entrenched after such a short decade-and-a-half of the internet's life? (Blogging software, however, is only about 8 years old.) So, my reason #1 for no comments is, "Why not? Just because that's what you do with blogs?" I have no interest in being a part of the "blogosphere". I am interested in being an artist and using virtual media, challenging it, creating with it, playing with it, rather than follow the same form that is now getting kind of rigid.
Another convention of blogdom, aside from its form, is the kind of fractured identities it presents. There are "celebrity baby bloggers", cooking bloggers, gardening bloggers. There are hundreds of blogs now just about shoes. You get the point. Blogs seem to have this tribal affiliation; you find your niche and blog away. While the internet has allowed us to connect, it's vast option anxiety has kind of forced people into these little cosy corners of personal authority. There are blogs about everything in particulars but not particular blogs that are about everything. I want to write about shoes, but can I do that on a blog that is about gardening? Not to mention that these specific-subject blogs have unleashed a fury of advertising-driven blogs about those particular arenas of commerce, but I'll get to that later in "Reason #3".
For the most part, the internet is still full of "representation" of art, rather than original art. Blogs have become about 'representing' your life. Personal websites are about 'representing' your ministry, art, business, whatever. Very little of it is actually generating its own art and becoming a space that is a part of you, rather than something that merely represents what you "do".
There are exceptions to this phenomena, of course. My friend Andrew Jones has one example of a blog that is not representational. His blog is highly driven by comments and daily blog entries, but his blog is actually a part of him. He thinks in this media; it is the ideal "form" for him. In actual conversation, Andrew is a fast thinker. (He's also the fastest walker on the planet--no one can keep up with him!) He synthesizes ideas very quickly and is able to funnel them down and connect them in dynamic ways. He doesn't think in long essays. Many of his friends, me included, have been trying to get him to write a book, because he is such a good, funny, smart and succinct writer. But I still wonder what his writing would look like on static pages in a book; his brain works like a blog. It is almost as if this media, this form of blog, was made for him. It scrolls off the screen quickly and dynamically converses with multiple things at once. It archives for future reference and connects quickly to its own archives. It is truly an authentic form for him and he uses it to its fullest potential.
(Andrew, I hope you don't mind me using you as an example!)
(And see, dear readers, there is an example of the meta-conversation that happens in blogs. This may be read within hours, commented on, and cross-referenced by someone else's blog about Andrew Jones. It becomes a part of the entire conversation. It is a very public and puzzle-piece medium. Someone may read this to find out information about Andrew rather than read this writing because it is a piece Amy wrote. Thankfully, "trackbacks" (the ability to publish what other blogs are saying about your blog instantaneously) are becoming a thing of the past, since spamming curtailed them.)
In my case, I am a much slower, more languorous thinker. Because I have writing on the internet that is not published in print, my blogs do not "represent" the writer, Amy. They are, I hope, extensions of my writing. But like I said, the conventions of a blog and the form as it is often used are not really ideal to the kind of writer that I am. I don't like thoughts quickly scrolling off the page. I ramble endlessly and I like each piece to be separate and not always connected to 5 other pieces on the page. Sometimes, I don't write for a few months on my blog, which is really a 'no-no' in the blog world. That's ok with me, because I am using it for different reasons and I don't like to publish things until I feel like they are "done". I have classic writers' perfectionism, and I also don't write every day.
And this brings me to reason #2, which I hinted at above. I don't blog to create a public discourse.
Of course many writers find this instantaneous community discourse fascinating and truly postmodern: meaning is truly interactive, it is not so much defined by an author as much as it is defined by the community (and in the case of advertising blogs, by the commercial possibilities). And artistically, the comments become a part of the whole piece. I'm still not so sure about this for myself. I'm hopelessly stuck somewhere in an age before the modernists or postmodernists came along, where the artist's vision was singular and offered to the public with his own personal meaning intact. Where his or her writing wasn't a "thing" that needed instant modification, commentary and (as if often the case with contemporary literary criticism) made to fit the theory of the reader.
I have a philosophical problem with comments, unless I created a site that was specifically about community discourse and sharing things with friends. I want people to consider what I have written, just as I have considered while writing it; I don't like instant reactions. The internet as a whole is still such a youthful medium, it is a world full of instant opinions, and instant reactions. People's reputations are built and destroyed in a day by the internet media. There is just no room for consideration in this fast-moving, instant opinion-ating addiction we have to information.
Reason #3 digs into a deeper concern I have with the fact the form of blog has largely been reduced by the mainstream and very commercial internet to a prostitutional "it" that can cheaply and easily be referenced and marketed.
In most of the internet, blog is now synonymous with promotionalism, product placement, and, even worse, "content-buying". That is how businesses talk about the information that is in blogs: it is "content". People now buy blogs and websites, and "content" is seen as a marketable, saleable thing that can drive your business or be used to sell other things.
Take the purchase of gardenguides.com, for example. Two years ago, this site was a space where I could purchase seeds and read articles by different gardeners. It was authentic. I could tell it came from a place, like a magazine, and there were real people who sold the seeds and who loved gardening. The difference between sites like this and ehow, ivillage or experts.com was that the site was driven by the people who loved gardening, and the writers were not just anyone who could provide knowledgable content but gardeners who were in some kind of relationship with the site.
All that changed, however, when a company bought gardenguides--one of those media companies which "buys content" and then uses the content as advertisement. You notice this now in all sorts of websites, where double-underlined words in articles randomly pop up as javascript advertising windows. (These are called "context links"; and they fill a page with advertising links to random websites that have sometimes nothing to do with the linked words themselves. In fact, people can now buy words that give them license over who gets to link those words!) It's all so random and unfortunate. Ultimately, this stole the authenticity from the web site, and it now looks like an advertising site and the information in it is full of abstract sources culled from previously published books or information which you can buy elsewhere if you want to read more about it, of course. And, sadly, they no longer sell seeds, but send you to advertisers where you can buy seeds.
To say the least, I am very opposed to this trend of "buying content", as I feel it views art, writing, image and anything remotely human as a mere vehicle for commercial purposes. The ultimate goal of "buying content" is not to financially support the communities or the authentic spaces of information, but to make a storefront out of information. "Information" becomes vacuous, saleable "content". Stuff. As an artist, I notice that this puts the form in front of the content, and it reduces content to a mere thing to fill space. A real newspaper doesn't just fill its pages with "content"; it is filled with writing and photography, which have meaning. (Read about a famous newspaper controversy with "context links" here: Forbes.com Removes Paid Links From News Stories.)
But don't get me going on the god of commerce. Those who created the blog as a medium are now completely focused on its commercial uses, and it is up to the artists to take it back for its creative potential, if it has any left. I started using Movable Type in 2000. At the time it was free blogging software and completely used, supportive of and offered to personal bloggers (mostly thinkers, writers, artists and techy people.) Slowly, MT kept changing its language until now it is offered strictly to the business community, as business software and content management. I still like MT more than all the other blog systems, but it now alienates (seemingly on purpose) any personal users by setting itself up for corporate users only. (For awhile, MT's personal users were told that Typepad was better for their purposes. Now Typepad is "the premier blogging service for professionals, hosting many of the world’s most popular blogs and small business websites". Users are now directed toward another product they've created for personal websites, as if personal bloggers want to just press a button and get hooked in without any control over their medium.)
What does this have to do with comments on blogs? A lot, to me. By neglecting the conventions of blog commenting I'm leaving out one possibility that could turn my thoughts into hype or a "thing" that can be owned by anyone other than myself. I am not content. I am an original thought. I am not writing personal thoughts in order to sell or represent some ephemeral idea of who I am, what I do. So, I feel that to be the most authentic to my own writing, I need to have a blog that is 1. advertisement-free and 2. free of public discourse. My writing is not interactive nor is it a product, and what others have to say about my writing or opinions are great but they are also a separate piece of art.
In conclusion, I want to challenge us to keep stewarding how the internet is used. It is not in charge of us, but we are in charge of it.
We have the freedom to recreate and use it or not as we wish. I want to add graciously that many of my friends use blogs primarily to communicate with friends, and I am glad they do. The internet is, after all, one big metaphor for communication. There has never been a technology that has so symbolized our need to communicate and feel connected the way the internet has.
But it is not communication itself. It facilitates it, yes, but it can even get in the way of communicating because it is just a system with no human being behind the wires. Who actually owns the internet? If we could answer this question, we could surely hold someone accountable for all the rampant child pornography, terrorist networks and other vast evil communications that go on every day on the internet. You can search Google for these things, too, and find them, but Google of course would not take responsibility because it is merely serving the abstract system of connectedness and not actually sorting through it. (And I do think that people are going to have to take some responsibility at some point, although many will cry censorship, but too many companies driving internet communications just believe they have no responsibility to facilitate, only facilitate the discovery.)
WE created the internet and we have to learn how to steward it; it cannot hold itself responsible. Man created the idea of oven, an amazing idea, but Hitler used it to bake people. The internet can be used for such evil ends, and so it is not capable of being good and wise in and of itself. (If you want to explore this idea, I highly recommend reading Martin Luther King's autobiography, who searched and searched for the best "method" in which to fight for the ideas of civil equality, and who ultimately said that even just systems can be used for evil ends. He hinted that it was possible that nonviolence and the "civil rights movement" would be capable of wrongdoing if in the hands of injust men. We cannot leave it up to systems to do what is our important and very human work of stewarding systems and even changing them radically, if need be, to closer represent the truth.)
I digress. My point is, we are connected with or without the internet, and the internet is still merely an incarnational symbol of how deeply connected things really are. It will not tell us "how" to communicate, or "how" things are actually connected. That is up to us. Just because I can communicate doesn't mean I should. Where once you might have written letters a few times a month, or made phone calls to distant friends once a week, we now make it our daily obligation to respond to all incoming communications.
I think we are all amazed how much this has helped us to communicate but when I sit down and think about it, with the help of the internet, I communicate with others about 10 times more than I used to even 5 years ago. When I sit down and do the math, I no longer feel guilty for not writing personal blogs or responding back to the 50 emails I got this week.
We are at times overcommunicated.
So, there is my lengthy and hopefully not too verbose reason why I don't use comments. (I like emails from friends about my blogs, however.) I perfectly understand why others like them, and am all for it if that is authentic to them. Don't let my thoughts take away from your comments. But just keep thinking, what else can I do with this? There is more to be done and played with... keep challenging the internet. It changes faster than any other medium so we should play with it!
