fling93 loves fishies

Short and Sweet? Not Me.

For those of you tired of reading Cinequest movie reviews, I’ll hold off on reviewing a couple of very excellent movies I saw on Saturday, Slim Susie and Dorian Blues. I may get to them later this week, but suffice to say that I highly recommend them if you ever get a chance to see them.

Anyway, according to Halley Suitt:

I think brevity is the soul of blog wit more than ever. Look at my archives and see some of my first year’s worth of posts — too too long and ponderous I think.

Short and sweet — the best blog is a fresh blog full of lots of little posts. Ask him and him and her and him and him.

Well, that’s a matter of what you’re looking for. Certainly, I think the majority of Americans will generally prefer this format, what with their infamous short attention spans and need for constant entertainment to stave off boredom. If all a blogger wants is a lot of traffic, it’s certainly a good way to go.

But personally, I don’t go for short and sweet (preferring blogs and women the way I like my coffee: tall and bitter… oh wait…). So I don’t read any of his example blogs. I’ve actually never heard of many of them, but I also don’t read what seem to me to be the two frequent short-post writers and also two of the most widely-read bloggers on the right and left, Instapundit and Atrios. Why? Well, partially because they update too often for me to keep up with (I stay on top of my blogs using their RSS feeds and getting a new item every few minutes would be too much to wade through). But what few times I have read them, they didn’t really have anything interesting to say. Most of their posts are typically just a link to something else without comment, or a partisan spin on a news event. I suppose this is very appealing to people who need a constant stream of entertainment and news and/or want to have their own world view reinforced (or want ammunition in their political debates with friends).

But this is of little value to me.

Why do I read most blogs? To learn as much as possible in order to have the most informed opinion as possible. I prefer my reading to give me information I didn’t know or provide analysis I wouldn’t have thought of. This is why my tagline is, “A guy who acts like a sponge, so he thinks he knows a lot.” I don’t want to be told what to think, or merely be told that what I think is already correct. What’s the use of that? It’s much more valuable to think for yourself, gather as much information as possible, and refine your views as new information challenges them. And remember, that last step is extremely important. Filtering out information that conflicts with your views is a very good way to come up with a very badly formed opinion (and that it seems to be such a universal human trait is one reason I doubt we were designed by a higher being).

If you peruse my favorite blogs, you’ll see a few that have a tendency to write long and substantive posts: Volokh Conspiracy, Brad DeLong, and of of course, USS Clueless. They run the political spectrum, so obviously, I don’t agree with everything they say (if you ever find yourself agreeing with everything that anybody says, you should worry). But I almost always appreciate the insights they offer and the good deal of thought they put into many of their posts.

And in case you couldn’t tell, those are the blogs I am trying to emulate.

Besides, there are plenty of concepts that are impossible to discuss in a short post. Heck, Matthew Yglesias remarked a while back that the standard 800-word newspaper column format is often too short. People are very complex creatures, which means the world is a staggeringly complex place. So you are very much mistaken if you think you can solve most of the world’s problems with sound-byte-sized ideas. One huge problem with our politics is that this is exactly the view of most Americans — and that is exactly how our politicians and our media want it to remain because it is easier to manipulate people who don’t think very critically.

As for entertainment, there’s nothing wrong with that. But life is too short to be bored. It’s cool to take a break and relax now and then, but there are just too many things you could be doing to ever feel like you have nothing to do.

So I have no intention of ever modifying my format to create shorter posts. I’ll strive to make sure the content is as original, educating, and thought-provoking as possible. But if you just can’t make it through an 800 word blog post (let alone a 2,000 word post — or a book), you have your own issues to work through.

Not that any such readers would have made it this far. Oh well.