If it is precision and analytical rigor in ideas that you want – and you value this more than anything else – you have to turn to the old masters, the tenured professors who have turned over a field a millions times in their heads and explored every angle. You study the great books with patience and care.
That’s not the only way to learn, however. Another way is through sheer reckless discovery and abandon, at your own pace and in your own way. Make your thoughts live and you have a chance to inspire others to do the same.
It’s the same with any field. You can discover music at the conservatory through theory classes taught by masters. Or you can go to concerts and let the living thing itself wash over you and through you, forming impression and emotions and spawning new ways of understanding.
There is a role for both, in my view.
The second, reckless but evangelistic, way to learn and share knowledge is called the live blog. It began with concerts and events. People attend and blog their impressions as they look and listen.
It is a great way to help the writer gain conceptual clarity about an event and its significance. It is also enormously fun for the reader to read. You feel like you are both at the event and that you are touring the impressions of a single person in attendance.
You can do the same thing with a book, and produce something that is really very new, a running account of the progress of the book and your own interpretive response to it. The idea is not to provide a thoroughly accurate account of the contents but rather to document your own response to the content as you read, chapter by chapter or even page by page.
While Tucker is referring specifically to "live blogging," I think some of his points also apply to blogging in general. Blog posts tend to follow a format referred to in psychology and literature as stream of consciousness: the writer's thoughts are presented more or less "raw," in the order in which they occur to him, rather than the more carefully edited and systematic organization of articles, essays, and books.
My prior reluctance to start a blog was based mainly on the idea that my posts would not be sufficiently polished or exhaustively researched. I thought that if each of my posts was not a self-contained article worthy of being published, my blog would just contribute to the Internet's "intellectual clutter" commonly ridiculed by the establishment media since blogs first started becoming popular. (In a typical case of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," the establishment has since created its own blogs.) But after reading Tucker's article, I suddenly saw an analogy between the apparent "noise" of the blogosphere and the seeming "chaos" of competition in the free market. As a firm advocate of free markets, I thought, I want to be a part of this!
In fact, the blogosphere is a subset of the free market that deals with the sharing of ideas. Just as one can find all sorts of physical products in the free market that are high quality or shoddy, safe or dangerous, vicious or virtuous, one can find blog posts that are well-researched or based on rumor, informative or vacuous, squeaky-clean or filthy. And just as the preferences of the consumers ultimately determine which products fetch the highest prices in the free market, the preferences of the blog readers ultimately determine which ideas bubble to the surface by being the most heavily referenced and linked. The marvelous power of "spontaneous" coordination of the free market arises because of, not in spite of, the welter of competition, so it seems reasonable that this property should also apply to the competitive ideas within the blogosphere.
In short, competition is a good thing. The real reason the establishment media ridicules blogs (except its own, naturally) is not because Joe Average's blog confuses and misleads the public, it is simply because the establishment hates competition. This blog is my competitive entry into the marketplace of ideas, so think of it as my way of sticking it to the establishment with low, low prices. I will not be undersold!
Most of my posts will relate somehow to the theory and practice of radical libertarianism and Austrian economics. I may occasionally "live blog" books as I read them, as Tucker recommends in his article. It sounds like an excellent idea. Once in a while I may post something completely off-topic, but you'll have to forgive me for that -- this is a stream of consciousness, after all!
The establishment is turning the entire world into a circus and blaming us, and people are very confused about what's going on. I'll tell you what's going on. The Age of Ignorance is coming to an end. Liberty is here to kick ass and chew bubble gum. . . and it's all out of gum.
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