One of our readers forwarded on “The Scorn of the Literary Blog” by Adam Kirsch, an article about the future of reviewing and book blogs; given our recent discussions about book reviewing, she thought it’d be an interesting addition to the dialogue.
Kirsch does raise some points I’d like to examine further:
Yet in the face of the constant shrinkage of newspaper book coverage — as inexorable, it seems, as the melting of the glaciers — the literary world still makes time to fight over some very minor “ethical” questions. “Should a book review editor assign a book on subject A to a reviewer who has also written a book on subject A?” the NBCC survey asked. “Should authors who publish with a particular house be permitted to review other books published by that house?” I can’t think of a working editor or journalist who would say no to either question. What’s more, such questions demonstrate a basically flawed understanding of what book reviews are for. […]
Mr. Tanenhaus put his finger on the source of the problem. Questions like those raised by the NBCC survey envision the book review as a transaction between author and reviewer, rather than between reviewer and reader. To be obsessed with potential bias or conflict of interest on the book reviewer’s part is to imagine the reviewer as a judge, who is obligated to provide every author with his or her day in court. But that judicial standard is impossible, because there is no such thing as an objective judgment of a work of literature; aesthetic judgment is by definition personal and opinionated. Nor would a perfectly objective book review even be desirable. The whole point of a review is to set one mind against another, and see what sparks fly. If the reviewer lacks an individual point of view, or struggles to repress it, there can be no intellectual friction, and therefore no interest or drama.
While I don’t think an author should be barred from reviewing another author solely based on potential conflicts of interest, such as being, I dunno, the AUTHOR’S EX, I do think a brief explanation or disclaimer before the review can’t hurt. It gives us a place to work from; it places these people in context. Conflict of interest can and sometimes does materially affect a person’s opinion, and brushing it all under the giant rug with “It’s All Subjective, Anyway” emblazoned on it isn’t doing anybody any favors, and ignores the nuances of the issue. No, book reviews aren’t FDA evaluation panels, and they’re not the peer-review process required for publication in academic journals, but as much as I possible, I want to see where the reviewer is coming from, if her background isn’t evident from her name alone. Asking people to declare any potential conflicts of interest isn’t the same as suppressing their point of view.
I have the feeling that the critics have hold of, if not the wrong end of the stick, then at least are wielding it from a very awkward angle. Am I wrong?
But book bloggers have also brought another, less salutary influence to bear on literary culture: a powerful resentment. Often isolated and inexperienced, usually longing to break into print themselves, bloggers — even the influential bloggers who are courted by publishers — tend to consider themselves disenfranchised. As a result, they are naturally ready to see ethical violations and conspiracies everywhere in the literary world. As anyone who reads literary blogs can attest, hell hath no fury like a blogger scorned. And the scorn is reciprocated: Professional writers usually assume that those who can, do, while those who can’t, blog.
I am somewhat lacking in context here, because the only book blog I follow with regularity nowadays is, well, this one. But my impression has been that most litbloggers lash out and act really pissy when people, like, say, Richard Schickel start talking about how blogging is DRAGGING DOWN THE THE DISCOURSE, MAN. (If litbloggers are feeling disenfranchised, maybe it’s because they kinda are?) But more to the point, I don’t get the impression that the litbloggers acting as watchdogs for print reviewers represents paranoia on their part, or resentment; the thing is, blogs are more mobile than newspapers are, and are able to cover a whole lot more in a really brief amount of time. Most litbloggers are reasonably well-connected within the publishing industry; if they don’t start out that way, they soon become so if they achieve any sort of popularity. They have a lot more dirt, and they’re not afraid to dish it out.
Again, I’m getting the feeling that Kirsch isn’t quite getting it—except for the bit about “hell hath no fury like a blogger scorned.” Y’know, we are a tetchy bunch of scrappers; just as the freedom to maneuver allows us to outstrip and outdo certain types of reportage, it also allows us to mash that “SUBMIT” button before we’ve had time to cool down. Instead of writing letters to the editor, WE’VE BEEN BLOGGING! (“I met her on the Livejournals! She said I was teh sex.”)
In fact, despite what the bloggers themselves believe, the future of literary culture does not lie with blogs — or at least, it shouldn’t. The blog form, that miscellany of observations, opinions, and links, is not well-suited to writing about literature, and it is no coincidence that there is no literary blogger with the audience and influence of the top political bloggers. For one thing, literature is not news the way politics is news — it doesn’t offer multiple events every day for the blogger to comment on. For another, bitesized commentary, which is all the blog form allows, is next to useless when it comes to talking about books. Literary criticism is only worth having if it at least strives to be literary in its own right, with a scope, complexity, and authority that no blogger I know even wants to achieve. The only useful part of most book blogs, in fact, are the links to long-form essays and articles by professional writers, usually from print journals.
This is where Kirsch loses me and makes me wonder if he reads and understands the nature of blogging. There isn’t a litblogger with the power and influence of Kos or Drudge? Of course there isn’t, for several reasons:
1. More people are interested in politics than books, and it’s easier to engage people in conversations about political matters than their reading material.
2. Political decisions, especially on the federal level, affect everybody. Much as we’d like to think Harry Potter has the same impact, it’s just doesn’t.
3. The news has coverage that the vast majority of books can only dream about. Just about everybody knows about the Virginia Tech shootings and can offer opinions and commentary. Not the same can be said about Thomas Pynchon’s newest, or hell, even Nora Roberts’ newest.
And those are just off the top of my head. Litbloggers are small beans compared to the political blogs? Fuck yes. Just as The Book Review is small beans compared to the front page of the New York Times.
And Kirsch, like most people who work primarily in print, dismisses blogs as a miscellany of links and ephemera in a way that I don’t think is quite accurate. Yes, some days there ain’t nothin’ but LOLHUNKS and links, but on many days, there are substantial issues that are talked over in the comments section of a blog. As for “bitesized commentary”—not that we can compare with the more substantial offerings of newspapers and magazines, because he’s right, it’s just not as comfortable to read the screen as it is paper for most people—all I can say is, many of the blogs I know offer pretty hefty bites.
And like Schickel, Kirsch seems to believe that reviewing strives for similar goals as academic criticism. I have the feeling that some sort of bait-and-switch was pulled; most of the article seems to be dealing with reviewing, and then BAM! we’re all of a sudden talking about literary criticism. The two beasts are related, but not necessarily the same thing. Is blogging suited for Criticism, big C, full of footnotes and lengthy analysis? Probably not. Is blogging suited for criticism, as in “commentary and analysis”? Certainly. In fact, I think it’s a wonderful vehicle for that sort of thing, because what you lose in elegance and profundity in the article itself, you gain in the ability to engage in a dialogue with other people in the comments. I’m not saying blogs are better; I’m saying blogs are different, and they’re encouraging people to engage in different ways with text, while it seems that people like Kirsch and Schickel keep thinking about blogs in print terms.
Still, it is important to distinguish between the blog as a genre and the Internet as a medium. It is not just possible but likely that, one day, serious criticism will find its primary home on the Web. The advantages — ease of access, low cost, potential audience — are too great to ignore, even if our habits and technology still make it hard to read long essays on the computer screen. […] But there’s no chance that literary culture will thrive on the Internet until we recognize that the ethical and intellectual crotchets of the bloggers represent a dead end.
Intellectual crotchets? What a marvellous phrase. And it’s true, blog drama can get tiring after a while, but it adds so much more interest and spice to the enterprise, don’t you think? Where’s Kirsch’s love of intellectual friction now, eh? For what it’s worth, I think that literary culture is thriving quite well on the Internet in its own Interwebbish format; whether print literary critics will recognize it as such is another thing entirely.
“it is no coincidence that there is no literary blogger with the audience and influence of the top political bloggers”
Huh? So Adam Kirsch’s implication is since there is no one currently in such a position, then there can never be one?
This type of rhetoric is what supports his argument? I do not get it.
Print medium really must have hit rock bottom then.
As a writer and a blogger and a veteran of numerous writer/blog snits, I have to disagree with Kirsch. Seriously, there are quite a few literary-minded blogs out there with huge followings. Miss Snark comes to mind (oh how I MISS her!) and oh, well, THIS one. Some of the most honest and piercing reviews I’ve read have been blogged…not printed in the sacred annals of NYC review mags. I think what he’s overlooking is that a blog can be targeted to a cross-section of people who are interested in a specific . Is that intellectual and ethical crotchetiness? I think not. I think you can find all the crotchets you need mired in the holier than thou mental transports of several well-known so-called reviewers who have made names for themselves. As a writer, I just want to know if it works. Did the reader get what I was trying to say? As a reader, I want to know if the storyline holds the slightest bit of interest for me. Perhaps Kirsch should consider that before condescending to an entire cross-section of the literary population.
For me, this website is trusted to give me the review as it is, without corruption or stupidity or censorship like in newspapers. Also, I think this man has obviously never really read a blog. And I can’t stand when people are patronizing! Especially since he doesn’t seem to understand the subject matter. the Internet is the last frontier so to speak where people can speak without censorship.I mean, hello? Fox? I wonder who is paying them? Is news always accurate? So Thanks for covering important issues and the Hoff.:) It is a good balance!
Y’know, the whole “bite-sized commentary” argument makes me wonder if he’s confusing the blog format with something like the reviews you get on Amazon, or on various community forum threads. I don’t hang around a lot of blogs, but don’t most bloggers, especially literary bloggers, err rather on the side of long-winded rants rather than bite-sized swipes?
And the defensive nature of his posture seems odd. Blogs vary widely in format and community, so which sites is he referring to with miscellany of observations, opinions, and links? In the excerpts included here, he comes across as having his own ax to grind, frankly.
You know, in Libraryland right now, we’re dealing with an idjit who happens to be a past-president of the major professional org blathering on via Encyclopedia Britannica’s blog with no clear agenda other than to incite some kind of flame-ish war and drive traffic to the EB blog rather than Wikipedia, ‘cause truly, blogs and Wikipedia are TEH EVIL and don’t have enough degrees to be experts. Then, I stumble on to this, and I’m thinking: who put what into the water?
blogs and Wikipedia are TEH EVIL and don’t have enough degrees to be experts.
A whole lot of people have issues with the freedom of web 2.0 type sites. And they are open to insane events of intentional manipulation, such as the Colbert Nation’s elephant stunt on Wikipedia:
The article is notable for being the subject of a joke on Stephen Colbert’s television program The Colbert Report. On the August 1 segment of “The Wørd”, Colbert coined the neologism “wikiality”, meaning that a large number of people could create a truth by consensus. To test this hypothesis, Colbert advised viewers to edit Wikipedia’s “elephant” article to indicate that the population of elephants had tripled in the last six months.[2] Colbert’s joke quickly hit online sites such as Slashdot and Fark, increasing the number of users trying to add the Colbert reference to the elephant page.[3]
Soon after the segment aired, Wikipedia editors swung into action, locking new and anonymous users out of the “elephant” article, as well as the “Stephen Colbert” article and several others. [4]
But for the most part they are also self-policing.
I’m a huge litblog reader so I can tell you that he basically has it wrong, all wrong, wrong wrong. Bookslut and Edrants, for example, may specialise in the useful, happening round-up of links but there’s The Valve, Long Sunday, Kugelmass, Books of my Numberless Dreams who churn out review length critiques on a fairly regular basis. And yes, some of them, particularly the first two I mentioned, and sites like The Reading Experience that feature—gasp!—literary criticism.
The fact of the matter is that newspaper book review pages do not normally offer anything resembling literary criticism and Kirsh admits that. They offer book reviews but then so do bloggers and, for the bloggers that intentionally go for more than 5 star evaluations, do offer a similar standard of work. In fact, as I always keep saying when this thing pops up, The NYTBR, The LA TImes, and the Philadelphia Inquirer have hired bloggers to write reviews.
The other fact of the matter is that there are different kinds of bloggers that try to do different things. They’re not all trying to be Edmund Wilson nor is that necessary. One doesn’t need a degree and a 5 page essay to offer helpful, worthwhile entertaining book talk. No sane blogger feels that her site will REPLACE book reviews. No one is angling for Kirsch’s jobs. So stop panicking, print weakling.
Here’s one of my favourite response to the whole thing: http://imani.wordpress.com/2007/06/12/dont-hate-me-for-posting-this/
I really think this is partly because it can be difficult to find the “good” blogs.
The best response to Kirsch is not a flame war, but to comment on his post with examples of blogs that prove him wrong.
Kirsch wrote: “The blog form, that miscellany of observations, opinions, and links, is not well-suited to writing about literature…”
I read print reviews. I read a little scholarly criticism. I enjoy the long form where the author can make her point(s) in a leisurely, detailed manner, where she doesn’t stop mid-point and apologize for being longwinded. But these forms only give me one opinion, and I have no way to disagree or challenge her assumptions or facts. I love the “miscellany of observations, opinions, and links” of the blog form. I love the speed of it, the variety of it, and the passion of the people who care enough to do it. Would Mr Kirsch prefer to go back to the good old days when dialogue about a book consisted of a letter to the editor, printed several weeks after the review, if even printed at all? I’m just a little person who reads, buys, and cares about books. I’m Mr Kirsch’s bread and butter, in fact. I want to know his opinions about books. He doesn’t give a flying fuck about mine. That’s a shame, but I’ll live. And I’ll keep reading the prints, and loving the hell out of blogs. Just excuse me, Mr Kirsch, for not feeling I need a PhD in order to have a valid opinion or observation.
What I find particularly interesting about this attack and those like it—and those of you who also work with late eighteenth/early nineteenth century materials might back me up on this—is the extent to which modern print critics have exaggerated their roots. Since the early 19th century (and possibly before—my expertise, such as it is, begins there), reviews of literature have existed in both “blurb”/announcement form and in the longer, more erudite and in-depth form that Kirsch seems to think defines Real Reviewing.
What’s more, this whole argument about who can review and why, not to mention what form (or publication) is best for said reviews feels like a rehashing of an argument that goes back to Francis Jeffrey and the Edinburgh Review. Articles like Kirsch’s seem panicky and defensive—the Old Guard clinging frantically to a system that’s changing, but they refuse to admit it.
(On a slightly different note, someday, I swear, I’m going to write an analysis of the best author-vs-reviewers!wanks from Lord Byron to Anne Rice.
Actually it’s not hard to find good litblogs because a great deal of the good ones are the most popular, the bloggers are being published in newspapers (with their url included at the end of the review), they are rubbing shoulders with publishers and critics at the BEA and helping the NBCC get the word out on the plight of book reviews in paper. The president of the NBCC has been quoted as saying there is no fight between litbloggers and print. Publications like the Times (US) and The Guardian (UK) and the *gasp* NYT have done articles presenting a list of what they think are the best litblogs.
This is an old hat argument that has been running for about two years now (if not more) and litbloggers are tired of defending themselves, stressing that there is no conflict and no dilemma for the regular reader.
Here’s an idea for Kirsch: do some research like a real print writer. There’s this site called Google, hope you’ve heard of it. Type in “litblog” see what comes up.
Also (and this should’ve gone in my other comment, above), this comment: “The blog form, that miscellany of observations, opinions, and links, is not well-suited to writing about literature” is so wildly incorrect that it’s barely worth mentioning.
But I want to mention it. Kirsch clearly has no sense whatsoever of the tradition of reviewing. Miscellany of observations, opinions, and references to other texts is the very *heart* of reviewing, and has been since the beginning. I have no idea what Kirsch has been smoking, but it’s definitely not the good stuff.
I blogged (oh no!) about this a couple of days ago. I brought up the SB in my post, specifically the post about the LA Times article.
I think Kirsch has never really read a litblog. If he did he could see that most bloggers do not consider themselves literary critics. How could we?
The only difference between my blog rantings and my in-print rantings (and I have enough of both to observe) is that the nasty, illiterate, mind-boggling comments are posted instantaneously on the web, while in print it takes a week for the arguements to be submitted, “polished,” and published.
Doesn’t make them any less retarded, though. Just makes them longer.
Yet more proof that printed media/newspapers are basically out of touch with reality…to the extent they believe the blogosphere is the cause, not the result of consumer dissatisfaction.
IMO any list published by NYT critics or their peers is as much about PCness and what silly ol’ me “should” be reading, than an actual objective critique. That’s why, as a reader, I totally ignore them and look to reader recommendations thru Amazon or Smart Bitches, etc. When on a website, I tend to pass by the professional reviewers, weed out the authors family and fangirls, then take an average of the remaining comments.
Those book snobs can continue to critique their “literature” & I will continue to read my “fiction” (I bet my fiction outsells their literature).
As a reader, I find most critiques useless and vastly prefer peer reader recommendations. This method serves me much better than NYT.
someday, I swear, I’m going to write an analysis of the best author-vs-reviewers!wanks from Lord Byron to Anne Rice.
That? would rock. Author/reviewer wanking (in all senses of the term) is more ghastlily amusing to me than almost anything else. Instant “oh no you di’nt!!!”
I’m going to lower the tone of conversation here for a moment to say: Venture Bros. reference FTW! Had to let that out.
Actually it’s not hard to find good litblogs
Obviously it IS hard for some. Either I’m blog-finding-impaired or I’m looking for something different than you are. I’m web savvy and book savvy, and I rarely find a blog I want to read regularly.
Also, I think someone mentioned Kirsch’s take is SO 1997. Well yeah, a lot of people were turned off blogs back when. Content-to-noise was terrible. As a result, many people feel as strongly anti-blog as people here feel anti-MySpace. That’s a lot of demotivation against exploring.
I think the inward-looking focus of the blogosphere contributes. A lot of bloggers reference mainly each other and rarely interact with “big” media or print media, so no wonder outfits like TBR don’t get any feedback (except the occasional flame). And on the Kirsch article, I count 37 comments and only one actually lists any litblogs Kirsch should be aware of; the rest are just rants.
I’m NOT saying Kirsch knows what he’s talking about. But I can understand some of why he doesn’t get it.
My heavens, why are they so threatened by people talking about books? It’s the opposite of free speech.
I’m a librarian, and the big push in public libraries these days is reader’s advisory. Meaning, come on in & we’ll talk to you about books. We’ll find you some new stuff to read. The secret of reader’s advisory is that you can’t read it all. Librarian /= Professional Reader. We need tools like reviews to be able to fake our knowlege. And considering how much gets published on a yearly basis, and how little is published in paper reviews, and how often that’s duplicated—bless the damn litblog so we can get a straight scoop on what’s out there, what people like, and what’s good/bad, enjoyable.
When I made that comment I wasn’t speaking to general internet users so much as journalists who have an obligation (I feel) to research and familiarise themselves with what they’re talking about before blabbing. Therefore when they make accusations about who’s the whatsit they can at least point to examples so one can respond more constructively to criticism.
It’s no excuse for him that he’s working off an impression of blogs a decade old. You and I in comments can pull that off but I’d expect someone in print with standards and a well-used critical apparatus to try to reach above something similar to an anti-MySpace bias. If he doesn’t want to explore then he shouldn’t mouth off on what he doesn’t know about. That’s all I’m saying.
That’s the problem with every.single. print criticism of blogs that I’ve read. They don’t know what they’re talking about, they work off decade old stereotypes so they wildly over-generalise and the conversation goes nowhere because there’s rarely anything of substance to talk about. The best criticism of blogs that I’ve read have been from other bloggers (eg. that the big ones all cover the same kind of books as the media, more or less, too much focus on authors rather than books, too impulsive etc.)
As for your personal preferences I do allow that it takes time to find out what you like. I’m tempted to think we may read different blogs (I don’t know) based on your comment about how they rarely interact with big/print media. That’s not been my experience at all and a lot of the print folks actually accuse bloggers of being parasitical, of being nothing but posters of links to the *actual* good stuff in print. For example the blogger I linked to in an earlier comments does regular reviews of Paris Review and, to a lesser extent, The Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. A prominent poetry blogger, Ron Sillman, does a regular list round-up. Sarah Weinman at her own blog does a weekly newspaper round-up. I could go on.
(NYT gets a lot of cover I think, it’s just mostly negative (and over-the-top a lot of the time). But there are a few of the prominent bloggers who do reasoned evalutations of the Sunday Review every week and once you get out to the “regular” book blogs there are quite a few who look forward to it every Sunday and list books they want to buy or that sound interesting.)
Other readers have commented on a certain “cliquish” behaviour with the more popular blogs but to me it simply read as bloggers with similar ideas and sensibilities who over the years had become friends. I never saw any become hostile to new folks. It may be harder for a newcomer to be familiar with some of the names thrown around, but it is a blog which works like a conversation. I was a new reader once too, after all, I just didn’t let that bother me.
I don’t blame the folks for not giving suggestions. Since the beginning of the year, even late last year almost every single “controversy” that’s gone through the litblog world was started by a print person dissing blogs. (If you want a list, I’ll be happy to type one out.) And it’s not even so much the frequency but how close together this article came after the very reasonable coverage of in the incident in the LA Times, after the panels about blogs and reviewing at the BEA. (Don’t these print folks read?) After a while you give less and less of a fuck, especially when the person in question displays no evidence of knowing what they’re talking about. Especially when they’re trumpeting the merits of the media they’re defending while simultaneously showing part of why less and less people read them, why less people respect journalists. I engage with folks who want conversation. Adam Kirsch, judging from that article, wants justification for his existence.
What pisses me off overall is that this isn’t about litblogs per se, it’s about the masses being able to join the literary conversation in a big way and the literati are horrified by the barbarians at the gate, even though those barbarians are happily abiding in their created space with no interest in looking for room in the castle.
Anyway if you like feel free to e-mail me with what kind of blogs you tried, didn’t like, and what you’re looking for. Maybe I could throw out some suggestions. As you can see I’ve clearly drunk the Kool-aid. In the end it may just be that litblogs are not to your taste and that’s fine. If they’re not to Kirsch’s taste that’s fine. The difference is that you didn’t see the need to act like an ass to say so, and Kirsch did.
I absolutely agree, journalists have an obligation to be more informed before they spout off. I find the first half of Kirsch’s article unobjectionable because in that domain he knows whereof he speaks. He gets into trouble when he wanders off into a diatribe outside his knowledge.
My comments weren’t meant to be a whine about my personal taste not being met on litblogs. I’m a picky reader, but I have found plenty of places to go. I’m also not talking about rude “cliquish” behavior; just the closed loop of internal exchange that happens among some groups of blogs. This isn’t about a sense of exclusion.
The motivation behind my comments is, I still remember the frustration of having trouble finding anything substantial in blogland, and walking away several times in aggravation. My point: there can be a high barrier to entry into the blogworld.
I realize that doesn’t compute for a lot of regular blog readers; in fact it’s counter to the usual notion of the internet as the great leveler. It’s not a technical barrier; it’s a culture gap, a perception, that I think is more common than bloggers realize. There are many bright, articulate people who can’t take seriously the idea that there’s worthwhile content in blogs. It really is akin to distaste for MySpace.
Hello—nice site you have here!
I just blogged about the same topic over at my bookblog – it’s good to see the bookblogging world fight back—and fight well!
At any rate, critics who denounce bookblogs are only illustrating their own archaism and narrow-mindedness. Too bad for them.
Long live the bookblog!
While there is a certain faction of those who blog to hurt others and build up their own pitiful self-esteem, the majority are just expressing their opinions.
As a publisher and businesswoman, I consider a basic marketing concept: You have to listen to your customers and give them what they want.
These blogs have allowed me to keep in touch with not only what the readers are looking for—and what they’re sick of—but what authors consider fair treatment and compensation, all the way to the big time folks. Smart Bitches alone has given me very important data, particularly on cover art.
I personally consider them a valuable business tool, not poor journalism. I’d rather hear what Average Reader thinks of the industry than a doctored and edited for PC-ness article by a journalist.
My opinion, of course.
“Intellectual crotchets” IS a marvellous phrase, but certainly not one coined by Kirsch. It is in print at least as early as 1931 (Margaret Hodgen, in the journal American Anthropologist 33:3).
Since I got my start writing as a kid by writing letters to the editor (and thus to other readers), I have always thought of writing as a two-way medium. But evidently many conventional journalists do not think that is so or the way it should be. I don’t see how they can pretend a disconnect that more and more simply does not exist. However, it can be arranged. Simply disable comments. Then ignore any other mentions of your work. Voila! You have achieved literary isolation.
It is perfectly possible to write extended, serious literary criticism in any medium. Even your own blood. The real question is, does anybody read it? No journalist can be certain that his/her piece in a newspaper or a book review magazine has been read. Except by the number of letters in response. Contrast that with any form of Internet publication. Here the journalist can get an accurate count of how many people not only looked at the publication, but also the specific essay, and how many read to the end of it. Scary thought, really.
And by the way, there are plenty of people blogging without traffic or comments, the Internet version of a diary—which is what these blogs started out to be in the first place. Their blogs have not been discovered. So they’re just talking to the wind.
I do not think this journalist needs to be so afraid or so condemning.
Is blogging suited for Criticism, big C, full of footnotes and lengthy analysis? Probably not.
—>Of course it is!
If you can print it, you can post it.
There are only two major differences between print and electronic venues:
1. Editorial action.
2. Distribution.
Addressing point 1: The internet allows any idiot to set up a blog, whereas a print newspaper or magazine typically pays their critics/reviewers, and therefore has an interest in hiring someone with chops. (Famous exceptions aside, the print venues generally succeed in this.)
However, this ignores the action of market forces. I suspect that at least part of the reason SBTB is popular is because you guys take no prisoners. A reader who wants straightforward “this book is good/bad because of X, Y, and Z” appreciates getting that here. If a literary critic wanted to set up a blog offering literary criticism, there is nothing stopping him or her from doing so, and nothing stopping people who want to read that sort of thing from finding and bookmarking the site.
Addressing point 2: The internet is widely available to most people in industrialized nations, and to the wealthy in non-industrialized nations. In short, most people who might buy a book have internet access. The most obvious disjoint in this Venn diagram might be a percentage of elder people who aren’t comfortable with the internet; one might callusly suggest that as time passes, this disjoint will diminish.
Finding things on the internet is problematic, yet the boys of Google make it easier every day. And not for nothing, but word of mouth and the grapevine have always been the most thorough means of spreading news. Create a good product, and people will tell each other about it. This applies to print as well as electronic media—people don’t wake up knowing about the NYTBR, someone has to tell them about it.
This whole business is the typical intellectual elite trying to shout down common discourse as they feel their ivory tower threatened. Or more accurately, feel it ignored. Your average man on the street doesn’t know they exist, and doesn’t care. Yet rather than trying to elevate their own profile, these guys would rather go on a smear campaign against the popular venues.
It’s like the chess club starting rumors about the cheerleaders. No matter how intelligent and worthy the intellectual elite may be, this behavior is strictly high school. It screams “I AM INSECURE!!!”
And, frankly, I don’t know why the rest of us waste time listening to them. Let them fuss, let them cast aspersions. Whoopdee-fucking-do. At the end of the day, they get more and more irrelevant, and quality bloggers get more and more readers. They won’t change human nature by squawking.
“Those big-shot writers could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar.” —Mickey Spillane