HOME / the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Kerr and Rothstein

the breakfast table:
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

The Perils and Rewards of Online Dialogues

By Sarah Kerr
Posted Thursday, March 11, 1999, at 3:11 PM ET

Dear Ed,

RSS

What a nice gloss on two of today's more offbeat stories. Between the two of us, I think we've done a pretty darn OK job covering the range of this week's news. But as time winds down I feel like stepping out of our usual culture-critic shoes for a second. I for one have opined "authoritatively" enough already for the month of March.

I don't know if Slate's readers know how demanding this dialogue gig is. On the one hand you want to entertain; on the other hand cyberspace isn't the Catskills, and when you try too hard it shows. Too many jokes and you can come across as shallow, or desperate. Narcissism, poor listening skills, ideological rigidity, dillettantism, false modesty, inappropriate rage, inappropiate flirtation, and the tendency to fall back on the same paltry vocabulary day after day also get magnified. I usually try to err on the side of sincerity, but for writers used to correcting drafts, this, too, is scary. Sincerity on the spot, in a hurry, twice a day, exposes your first uncensored impulses and all your glaring limits to the world.

If I'm not mistaken, Ed, this is your first time in an online dialogue. I'm curious to know how the process struck you. Was it harder or easier than you thought it would be? Do you think it's good to bring this kind of exposed personal fallibility to criticism? Or do the issues you prefer to address as a critic get muddied? These questions may in fact be related to some of the themes we've discussed earlier in the week. I mean look at us here, performing a very, very unremarkable activity: reading the newspapers. Why are our reactions to today's story on Page A7 more interesting or valuable than the reactions of 421,198 other readers of the same story? They aren't, of course. Yet we're the ones with the amazing privilege of distributing our opinions for public consumption, and getting paid for it. I think you could argue that we're the rather arbitrary winners of our own mini-cultural sweepstakes. Take note, however, that at the same time Slate has granted us this privilege, it has scaled back its traditional criticism (scaled it back too much, in my opinion.)

More privilege, less stability. Here's what I'm getting at: Is this week's discussion yet another manifestation of bubble culture? At times I fear that this is the case. On the other hand, we're trying our best, and that's worth something. And once in a while I make a discovery in a dialogue that I wouldn't in a typical review; this alone makes me want to keep going.

How about you?

Sarah