No comment

The Canadian blogosphere exerts a lot of peer pressure on those bloggers who choose not to turn comments on. One-sided monologue, the accusations fly. Newspaper columnists posing as bloggers. And it is true that most of the political bloggers who don't have comments turned on are either professional political journalists like Andrew Coyne or Paul Wells, or other political personae like Warren Kinsella or Monte Solberg. Most of them have explained their choice by voicing a fear of being held legally responsible for what others say on a site with their name on it. And then there's this blog, which also hasn't ever allowed comments, but my reasons behind that choice are a little bit different.

Some of the more minor ones include the following:

1. I really don’t like the way commenting is set up on most blogs. On personal journaling-based sites like livejournal or some more professional-looking blogs like Daily Kos, the comments are threaded so that you have a choice of commenting either on the post or on one of the comments. At livejournal, your comment is even emailed to both the owner of the journal and to the person being responded to, which makes it much easier to keep a real conversation going without having to check back on every one of the ongoing conversations you're involved in. And after all, the only reason to turn commenting on at all is to get real conversations going. Otherwise, why bother?

2. I welcome respectful disagreement, but I see very little of that in the political blogging world. Most of what you see in comments is either fawning agreement or rude hit-and-run disagreement, neither of which I like and neither of which I particularly want to court here. There’s a lot that goes on out there that I’d rather not have in my backyard, so to speak. And I actually think people are more likely to say what they really think in a respectful sort of way if they’re not performing for others, i.e., if they're sending private email rather than posting comments.

The third and most significant reason, though, surpassing both of those other reasons combined, is that I never really intended to become a political blogger. I enjoy reading political blogs; I actually was a regular commenter on various other blogs for about two years before I ever created this one. I was also already writing regular pieces on various topics and sharing them with my friends anyway (which is why a lot of the posts here are older than the site itself). Eventually, a couple of those friends convinced me that I should really consider creating a blog for my various politically oriented rants so that a wider audience could read them if they wanted to. Because I was already feeling a little annoyed at not having something to put in the "URL" line when I commented on other people's blogs, I wasn't all that hard to convince.

I decided from day one not to take it particularly seriously and only to throw things out there that I was already writing to share with my friends, mostly because I didn't want to feel pressured into writing more regularly than I wanted to. That decision lasted about two weeks. See, the first thing I noticed was that people were suddenly taking the comments I was making on theirblogs a lot more seriously--they were actually generating discussion! Having a recognized name in the blogging community, even a pseudonymous one, seemed to be a free ticket to exactly the sort of thing I was trying to do--have discussions with some of these bloggers whose work I enjoyed--and the more I wrote, the more recognized my name became. And as a side effect, occasionally people would like reading the stuff I had to say, too...and, frankly, it's fun to be read. Gradually, I started developing a greater commitment to this little blog than I'd originally wanted to have. I'm having fun with it, but it takes away from all of the other things going on in my busy life, and I'm not always sure how I feel about that.

So I suppose what I'm saying is that in a way, not having comments enabled is sort of my way of remaining in denial about the fact that I'm now a real political blogger. On the more rational end of things, comments are one more thing that takes time...time I don't necessarily have to spare. I have a limited number of minutes in the day to spend on blogging-related activities, and since my original intention was to be a voracious reader and only a very occasional blogger, most of me would rather spend that time reading and commenting on other people’s posts than responding to comments on mine. I could always just refrain from responding to comments–a lot of bloggers do–but again, why allow them at all if you’re not going to promote genuine back-and-forth conversation?

At the same time, though, I'm also sensitive to the fact that whether it was my original intention or not, I'm now a member of a community, and it's a community that strongly values the option to comment. I understand and respect the reasons behind this, so I'm going to experiment a little with turning comments on. I don't know yet how I'm going to feel about the results, especially given reasons one and two above, so I may turn them back off again. But I want to at least give it a chance.