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First let us agree that there are at least two strikingly different views on the blogosphere. One (I have discussed before) is that held by people like Andrew Keen. He complains that the internet is transforming our culture into a cacophony of “infinite filibustering”, a noise of “hundred million bloggers all talking about themselves; a place where truth is “flattened”, where “ignorance meets egoism, meets bad taste, meets mob rule … — on steroids.” And more to the point, this “chaos of useless information” is not just pop culture entertainment, but a threat to civil public discourse, “encouraging plagiarism and intellectual property theft and stifling creativity.

Almost polar opposite to that view are those of people like David Weinberger, who argues that “Web conversations look to many like echo chambers because of the nature of conversation itself.” The blogosphere “tells a story of constant conversation, elaboration, and disagreement that is not visible in a simple map of links” and is in fact a “powerful force for democratic institutions and open markets, not a polarizing and simplifying medium. . . This is how meaning grows. . . (and that) the public construction of meaning is the most important project of the next hundred years.”

If the blogosphere is as Keen describes — a pit of electronic ‘nattering nabobs of negativism‘ — then why bother to waste time reading blogs? Well, there is the occasional illicit entertainment value they offer or the niche-group (cult?) information they collect. And of course there’s the simple pleasure of witnessing the decline of civilization itself. Ok. Good reasons all. But if the blogosphere is as Weinberger observes — a postmodern wellspring of democratic practice — then we have a duty to get right in there and do our part for the betterment of the human race.

But seriously, most would agree that the blogosphere is here to stay, at least for a little while (even the two authors above have blogs), and if we say for the moment that the phenomenon is a modern day ‘meaning-construction project’ in process, then why and how should we read blogs?

To get some perspective, I went back to the wisdom of an ‘ancient’ text (paper-based, of course) written by Mortimer Adler in 1940 (a bestseller no less) entitled, simply enough, How to Read a Book. Yes, I know, blogs are not books, — or magazines or newspapers — but we do read (and often listen) to them and want something from them as well. So let’s look at some of Adler’s observations and see how they hold up to today’s demands.

Why Read?

• Adler: There are two distinct senses of reading: one is the the reading of “newspapers, magazines, or anything else that , according to our skill and talents, is at once thoroughly intelligible to us. Such things may increase our store of information, but they cannot improve our understanding. . . The second sense is the one in which a person tries to read something that at first he does not completely understand.” Through reading, one begins to understand more, and not just remember more information. “There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.” Adler believes there is a deep difference between reading for information or entertainment, and reading for understanding.

• Blogosphere: Blogs are great information and entertainment devices. But we often do start to confuse those attributes with understanding. The sheer volume and weight of a voice does not, in itself, mean an enlightened one. The challenge is how do we plunge into this cacophony, using all the intellectual and technical tools at our disposal to build understanding? Readers and their books build understanding one person at a time. Weinberger argues that blogs build shared understandings, because most of us “think by talking with others.” Knowledge “isn’t in our heads: It is between us.” Is Weinberger’s shared knowledge the same as Adler’s “understanding” ? Is a college student’s assemblage of a term paper from snippets of Wikipedia (or any other super-library) the same as the struggle to think through a complex series of intellectual relationships? I don’t think so.

What is reading?

• Adler: The art of reading is “the process by whereby a mind, with nothing to operate on but the symbols of the readable matter, and with no help from the outside, elevates itself by the power of its own operations. The mind passes from understanding less to understanding more. The skilled operations that cause this to happen are the various acts that constitute the art of reading. “

• Blogosphere: No problem here except for two points: Adler talks about “no help from the outside” and in another passage talks about the “essentially loneliness of the reader”, a solitary conversation with a solitary author. In the blogosphere, no reader has to be lonely. In fact the ability to be lonely is hard to do and contravenes the cultural and technological everyday social networky machinations of blog world view. Second, the blogosphere rides on the back of a particularly postmodern orientation to reading which Weinberger alludes to in his book. Adler sees that there are authors and readers. In the world of perpetual remix, there is no author, no distinction from the reader, and no content ownership.

What is Active or Good Reading?

• Adler: Many make the”error of assuming that to be widely read and to be well-read are the same thing.” There are way too many “literate ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well.” Good or analytical reading is a silent conversation with the author. “If . . . you ask a book a question, you must answer it yourself.” But what are those important questions? Adler says four: What is the book about as a whole; What is being said in detail – and How; Is the book true, in whole or part; and finally, What of it? “And that is why,” according to Adler, “there is all the difference in the world between the demanding and undemanding reader. The latter ask no questions – and gets no answers.”

• Blogosphere: I don’t think anyone would say that these questions and active reading are foreign to the blogosphere. But there are differences in how this all gets acted out. Adler’s silent and solo conversation with the book (implicit and tacit as Weinberger says) is now public, explicit and consequential: private thoughts are now a never ending reality show that has social impacts. “Reading will cease to be a one -way activity. . . All that metadata, and every use of metadata will enrich the context within which we make sense of what we read and learn” (Weinberger) If everything is meta, how do we meta-read that? Do we achieve a meta-understanding? And what the hell is that anyway?

Good Books, Bad Books

• Adler: Good books must make demands on you. “You must tackle books that are beyond you. . .Only books of that sort will make you stretch your mind. And unless you stretch, you will not learn. . . A good book does reward you for trying to read it. . . (a bad book) is not worth the effort of trying. You receive no reward for your struggle. . . The great majority of the several million books that have been written in the Western tradition alone – 99 percent of them – will not make sufficient demands on you.” As you become a skilled reader, you get better at discerning which are which.

• Blogosphere: Good blogs must make demands on us as well if we are to view them as Weinberger does. And like Adler, we complain that the blogosphere is clogged with bad blogs. But as we become a skilled blogger and blog reader, we get hints from our RSS feeds, begin identifying the best bloggers for our interests — those that both agree and disagree with our perspective — and throw out the trash. We just have to spend a lot of time and a lot of technology doing just that. It seemed simpler back then.

Arguments

• Adler: “An “argument begins somewhere, goes somewhere, gets somewhere. It is a movement of thought.” But “you have to recognize an argument when you see one, and there may be some people who are argument-blind!” Authors make propositions. They have personal opinions. Yet authors should have reasons for their views and arguments as to why we should be persuaded to accept them. And then there is arguing. “For the disputatious and contentious, a bone can always be found to pick a quarrel over.” Adler believes in an intellectual etiquette. Something can be learned in good conversation. Disagreements are “arguable matters” taken with the supposition that when all is said and done, the original issue can be “resolved.” A reader must be able “to carry on a civil, as well as intelligent, controversy.” Talking back to an author should focus on four (once again) possible areas of disagreement: “You are uniformed, or misinformed, or illogical or your analysis is incomplete.”

• Blogosphere: There is a certain pride in the contentiousness of blogs. The blogosphere is often a messy, name-calling, blustering, ideological jungle of bad posts, bad arguments, constant misunderstanding and intellectual laziness. Sure, there is a fledgling blogger’s etiquette of sorts bound to grow as the culture develops and (should I say it) the blogosphere becomes more institutionalized. So there is a lot to learn from the old school, and a history of thoughtful debate that should be appropriated into the blogosphere. The focus should be on the quality of the argumentation and not on the volume. This is definably happening as blogs continue to move from outlaw status to a mainstream form of social expression.