Friday, February 19, 2010
Media / Phillips Blog Summit Recap: Sean Braisted, Yvonne Smith and Adam Gold at Vanderbilt
Posted by Betsy Phillips on Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 9:44 AM
The writing studio at Vanderbilt University had local blogger
click to enlarge
s Sean Braisted, Yvonne Smith, and our own Adam Gold as the guests at Thursday night's installment of "On Writing."
It was really nice.
The bloggers were well-chosen. In just three people, the audience got a good sense of the breadth of experiences contained in the term "blogger." You had a political guy who blogs for fun, a vegan activist who blogs in order to raise the profile of her cause, and a music writer who gets paid, in part, to blog about music.
And the questions were thoughtful and elicited many interesting responses.
Each blogger spoke a lot about his or her philosophy of blogging. All three noted that they enjoyed the format's immediacy, of being able to have a forum to respond publicly to whatever catches their attention and to engage others in discussion.
But each of them also talked at length about their different approaches.
Smith is blogging as a part of her larger new-media (and regular old media) efforts to engage people in becoming vegan. For her, it's all about crafting a way to interact with the public that promotes her efforts.
She spoke about limiting what she says or how she says it because, even though controversy drives traffic, she wants people to see that being vegan is about eating good food and having a fun lifestyle. Too much controversy might put people off. She also has no compunction about deleting negative or overtly sexual comments, since it's her space.
Braisted has a political blog, so I thought it was really interesting that he said blogging was a poor medium for activism. He called it an effective avenue for engaging the political classes, but was less sold on a blogger's ability to make broad grassroots change.
At other times, he talked about blogging as being like a more effective letter to the editor, since he could guarantee for himself that it would be published. He seems to understand blogging as a way for people who traditionally have a weak public voice to be heard by politicians and the mainstream media, but he feels it's not a successful platform for people to bark down orders from on high.
Gold touched on the real strength and appeal of blogging (at least, in my opinion) a couple of times -- that the reader can respond to the author directly, for better or for worse. When asked specifically about how blogging has changed his life, he said that it has made him less anonymous and more available for criticism.
He didn't seem to think of this as a bad thing, though. "Whenever you put your stuff out there, people are going to have an opinion of you," he said. Blog comments just provide a means for authors to hear it directly.
And Gold shared with the audience John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, which tickled me so much and made the whole audience laugh.
Best of all, there was an audience! Even though, as with almost everything at Vanderbilt, you had to sit around and wait and wait and it's almost time to start but you're the only one there and then *POOF* a large crowd all arrives out of nowhere and it's fine and nice. Still, there's that moment when you're like, "Oh god, is this going to be the event where no one shows?"
Also, there were cookies -- the ideal cap to an engaging evening.
Comments (5)
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Sean spoke on the impact of blogging at a grassroots level? Isn't that a little too "micro-" for a thoroughgoing advocate of "macro-"?
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Posted by
Mike Byrd
on February 19, 2010 at 10:27 AM
Mike,
I was referring more to its efficacy with, you know, getting people elected and such...not getting a stop sign put up or something to that effect.
Posted by
Sean Braisted
on February 19, 2010 at 10:46 AM
