Legal education and blogging
On today's NYT Op-Ed page, Paul Krugman and David Brooks both had columns in which they said the Times wouldn't let them endorse a candidate. But they made sure to hint strongly as to their preferred choices.
In contrast to those columns, it was refreshing to have a swarm of blogger statements filling the center of the page. The Times: “The Op-Ed page asked bloggers from all points on the political spectrum to say what they thought was the most important event or moment of the campaign that, we hope, comes to an end today.” And the bloggers went ahead and said what they wanted to. Wonkette did a particularly good job:
I was all set to vote for
George Bush even after finding out that he wouldn't let me marry Mary Cheney if I wanted to. . . . But in the end, with the fate of the free world at stake and all, I've got to go with the guy who would admit that sending thousands of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians to their deaths to protect us from imaginary weapons was, in fact, a mistake.
So the bloggers had an endorsing voice, but the columnists didn't.
[sweeping segue…modulation] I get very excited about the possibilities of technology in the classroom, and online ways of teaching. But it's becoming clear to me that humans offered the ability to just talk to one another would prefer to do that. Sure, the lecture to a large room is a dead form, but people like the compactness and richly informational nature of talking and listening in a quiet room filled with lots of other humans.
We had a particularly vivid example of this predilection this past weekend, when one of the State of Play panelists decided to speak through an online avatar. So the panelist busily typed away, and another person in the audience read the avatar's words out loud into a microphone. This seemed completely unnecessary and irritating. The panelist was there! She was in the room! She should have been talking to us! But, instead, we were stuck with a static avatar not saying very much (not even twirling) with a halting voiceover slowly saying what the avatar puppeteer had typed.
Online talk is best when it's necessary in some sense. Because there's a classroom, and a classtime, and a regular session for chatter, we'd rather show up to class together than pretend to be deeply engaged in an online thread about the same sorts of subjects we're discussing in class. It just doesn't seem efficient/necessary/satisfying to move part of the class online. If we moved all of the class online, that might work — particularly if we gave a lot of credit and recognition for what happened online.
Same with the bloggers on the Op-Ed page today. Blogging works because it's the only way people can have a voice that is found by their peers without an enormous, expensive, authoritative structure supporting it. it's necessary. I bet a blogger who had lots of other more traditional ways to reach the public (an authoritative platform of another kind) would not be as interesting a blogger. And might even forget to blog.
So: it's a tradeoff. Necessity has produced new forms of journalism online, and will soon produce new forms of online legal education. In the meantime, the traditional ways of doing things are not going away.
But those poor traditional columnists aren't getting to endorse candidates. It's a shame. They should try blogging.