The New York Sophist

did you ever use LiveJournal? I miss it a lot.

The reason I miss it mostly is because LiveJournal existed prior to social media, and was a great way to have a social media style friends list and feed, but it was long form too.

LiveJournal though was only long-form if you wanted it to be that. Otherwise it could be like Twitter/X – a short one line post was totally acceptable. Composing for LiveJournal really, in hindsight, feels like freedom. We currently live in a very rhetorically rigid world, one where a Tweet has a style, a Facebook post has a style, an Instagram post has a style – and you cannot move between them very easily. There’s no way that these modalities can cross between one another. Very frustrating.

However in the days of LiveJournal I could post a picture with a short comment, a one or two line (160 characters) comment on something, or a very long blog post.

I think that using this blog like I used to use LiveJournal is going to improve the quality of my posting, or at least give me some rhetorical variety that I am just now realizing I miss from direct social media.

People do use Facebook like a blog, but it’s really not the same thing. They are able to really rail against the things they hate – political and otherwise, or make extreme statements because they know the exact limits of their audience. They only post to those who are of a certain bent or position, so they are able to really push views that are not well constructed, thoughtful, or considerate of oppositional viewpoints.

But a blog, like this one, can’t relax in that way. I have no idea who will read this, so I have to write to a “universal audience” – the theory that I have to imagine a typical person who reads critically and thinks about what they are reading, and attempt to write in a way that makes sense for this “subject” which I construct from my own experiences as a 21st century citizen writing for whoever is “out there.”

This is better than pandering, i.e. writing for the lowest common denominator to get views and clicks. Sometimes on Facebook and other social media you see pretty smart people doing this. Social media makes us very lazy when it comes to rhetoric. It might be directly responsible for the very poor quality of our public discourse and public political discourse today. We don’t have to adapt, and we mistakenly confuse social media audiences for a “public.”

LiveJournal had all the good elements of social media and you could post publicly too. I really miss it. I will try to reform it here, making this a place to try to recover those norms of discourse from the earlier days of the internet.

Looks like I’m back on BlueHost typing away.

Watching a little football today and got nostalgic for my old WordPress site. So here we are again, three years later, doing it.

I have a number of substack posts that I might import but then again why? I will probably just rewrite them with some edits and new thoughts that have come to me since those posts were made.

There really isn’t much substitute for this simple interface is there? We just keep trying to innovate on perfection. Blogging is blogging, and this is really it. Why did I ever leave?

I set up a substack which I think will become this blog, or a copy of this blog over time.

I think keeping this space alive is important and good for my practices, but probably not the easiest or best way for audiences to do so. It might be a bit easier to get the substack email when I post and read it there.

Blogging is a great art form, something I love to do no matter how infrequently my posts seem to indicate. I really like the challenge and the work. It does great things for my mind and perspective and also confronts me with that never-dull question of audience.

Substack seems like a great tool to curate audience and simultaneously reach “the public,” whatever that might mean to us today.

Please consider signing up for the substack and also check back here for writing as well!

Getting back to my roots here – just read a good, if older, post about academic blogging. Some of the concerns in that article mirror the great concerns raised by Gordon Mitchell in his fantastic recent post on the 3NR blog.

Why do I blog? It’s clearly for me to think through questions, but often times it is for me to imagine an audience and write for them, like a journal or diary I guess. It also, hopefully, will spur some conversation or thought among those who happen across it. But mostly it’s for me to share my recent thoughts with those who read this. Hopefully they might make a comment.

But recently it has been historical in nature, documenting the American debate exchange, which is super-fun!