I write like an ape. Please leave a comment!

The art of writing is nothing less and nothing more than the art of transmitting information. The right pieces of information at the right time, in just the right quantities. 

On a practical level, that means that the art of writing is a compromise between sprawling and incomprehensibility. Either you write too much information and the texts get tedious to read. Or you skip entire steps of thought and the texts become incomprehensible. 

In theory, the rise of blogging could offer a remedy to this problem: The comments section. If people read a book and don't get one thing or another, they can do little about it. Ask a friend maybe, search on the internet if it is a famous book. If people read a blog post and don't get one thing or another, they can just ask the writer, in real time. If the writer is too famous and busy to answer, they can ask other readers, who might offer explanations. 

So blogging should allow writers to write shorter and denser. The risk of being misunderstood should be more manageable in a blog post than in a book or a magazine.

In theory, online magazines could have the same advantage as blogs, because mostly, they actually have comments sections. But the writers seldom use them. Why don't they? Is there a written, or unwritten rule that they are not supposed to do that? It could be a question of who earns from comments sections. An interesting comments section is good for a publication. But mostly for the publication as such, not for the particular writer answering comments. So if one article writer of a magazine sets out to answer comments while the others don't, that writer will do work for free. Then they will look like they are not particularly busy. That's not high status. On the contrary, most blogs only have one writer. So the writer is the publication. If the writer wants to raise the value of their publication through answering comments, that is seen as a good strategy and not low-status at all.

In the service of readability

I'm sure many people don't agree with me that sprawling texts are a problem at all. Texts that I stop reading because of their too many words often have tons of likes and comments, so obviously many people are less picky than me.

Still, I think that inefficient writing is a real problem, because it puts barriers to something very important: Human communication. The better we can communicate, the better we can understand each other. The more we can learn from each other, the more we can learn about the world. If every person could write a dense, pointed summary of things they know but most other people don't know, we all would know a lot more about the world.

Blogs already have a number of disadvantages compared to books. In the best case, books serve the reader with carefully ordered information and arguments that the reader can consume when they have the time for it. Blogs throw a few pages here and a few pages there on their poor subscribers when they expect it the least. The least thing we blog writers can do to compensate for that is to make the information we throw at our readers reasonably compact. The comments section should help us to achieve that. If readers just say what they spontaneously think, writers can spend less text inevitably failing to explain everything to every kind of person.

Be a good citizen, write a stupid comment

In other words, I am arguing for spontaneous speaking on the internet. This superficially goes against the idea that spontaneity destroys the internet, as Jonathan Haidth recently argued. But I wholeheartedly agree with Jonathan Haidth there. Emotional mob behavior destroys public discourse through taking away norms for civility that took millennia to build.

Public emotional spontaneity is bad. But public intellectual spontaneity is good. If people tell what they spontaneously think sounds stupid, strange or incomprehensible in a text, that eases the burden of writers to hedge against all possible misunderstandings. Which in its turn eases the burden of readers to get through all that hedging. Intellectual spontaneity makes the internet a better place. Spontaneously asking writers "are you really that stupid?" is a service to the whole internet.

I fully understand why people don't do this very much. When asking "are you really that stupid?" one runs a very realistic risk of appearing stupid oneself. For that reason I often abstain from commenting on blog posts I read myself. If I feel a little sleepy or drowsy, I often think that I probably don't really get it at this moment so I don't dare to comment. But as a writer, I appreciate comments also from people in a drowsy state, because I want to know how my texts appear to drowsy readers too. After all, reading blogs is probably a typical late-evening pass-time.

Sure, if only people who are perfectly awake participate, the comments section will be a tidier, easier to read place. But I think the function of the comments section is to be an untidy counterweight to a well-edited post. I think the comments section should be to a blog post what the end notes are to a book: A sprawling mass of text that allows the post in itself to sprawl less.

For that reason I dislike the "Liked by author" function here on Substack. All comments are a kind of feed-back to me as a writer and an opportunity to clarify things. My job is to learn from them and answer them, not to judge them after how well they captured my intentions. Many smaller bloggers routinely press "like" on every comment. But I'm afraid that if I acquired such a routine, sooner or later I would do like the king and the queen in Sleeping Beauty and forget one fairy, I mean comment, and then that commenter would feel understandably bullied. Instead I opt for never pressing "like", because I like every comment by default. 

So please, write a comment. One that makes sense or one that doesn't. Thought-over or completely spontaneous. Sober or semi-drunk. Restraint is good in the emotional department. But on the intellectual side, blurting out your thoughts probably makes the internet a better place.  

I'm sorry for the uneven publication pace recently. When I persuaded Anders to start a blog with me, I argued that if we both wrote posts, we could make up for each other's down time and maintain a more regular posting routine. In reality, things became the opposite. When Anders has down time, I don't dare to publish anything, because I feel dependent on his advice (as I told you, I write like an ape). So writing together makes us more irregular rather than more regular. But I don't want to do anything about it, because writing together makes us write better.