Blogs Are Like Plato

Gentle readers, I’m high on delusions of grandeur. Just when I was wondering if blogging was a ludicrous self-indulgence invented for people who have neither the skill nor the discipline to engage in more serious writing, I read that “blogs are like Plato.” (No, not Play-Doh.)

In an article on blogs in the New York Review of Books (one of my fave old-school rags), Sarah Boxer says, just like Plato, bloggers “often begin their posts mid-thought or mid-rant—in medias craze. They don't care if they leave you in the dust. They're not responsible for your education.” She uses the opening of Plato’s Republic by way of example:

‘I went down yesterday to the Peiraeus with Glaucon, the son of Ariston, to pay my devotions to the Goddess, and also because I wished to see how they would conduct the festival since this was its inauguration.’
Wait a second! Who is Ariston? What Goddess? What festival?

This set off waves of flashbacks to grad school (deep, dark secret: I studied philosophy in a past life), when we had long discussions of exactly what Plato’s theory of education might be and whether one person can “teach” another anything. But, yeah, that’s it—you’re responsible for your own learning. The trick is to awaken people’s curiosity about the contradictions and limitations in their ideas. Come to think of it, that’s not too far off from my ideas about teaching children.

So blogging isn’t just masturbatory opinionating divorced from any reality check. We bloggers are Important—we're Socratic gadflies (is this blog going to get me killed?). Anyway, check out Boxer’s article on blogging. Appropriately, although the NYRB has posted the article online, it didn’t include any links. Love it.