More Noted Things ...

Terry Teachout's"Culture in the Age of Blogging," Commentary sees blogging as a sign of the disintegration of a common culture in the United States. Now two years old, his blog, About Last Night, is a part of what he calls a" culture archipelago" of blogs of related interest on the net – decentralized, balkanized, atomized and far more immediately interactive in comparison with"the city-based cultural enclaves of the past.""One thing of which I am sure is that the common culture of my youth is gone for good," says Teachout, in conclusion.

It was hollowed out by the rise of ethnic"identity politics," then splintered beyond hope of repair by the emergence of the web-based technologies that so maximized and facilitated cultural choice as to make the broad-based offerings of the old mass media look bland and unchallenging by comparison. For all the nostalgia with which I look back on the days of the Top 40, the Book-of-the-Month Club, and The Ed Sullivan Show, I prefer to make my own cultural decisions, and I welcome the ease with which the new media permit me to do so.

At the same time, however, I still feel the need for a common space in which Americans can come together to talk about the things that matter to us all. And so my hope is that the blogosphere, for all its fissiparous tendencies, will evolve over time into just such a space. No doubt there will always be shouting in the blogosphere, but it need not all be past each other. When the history of blogging is written a half-century from now, its chroniclers may yet record that the highest achievement of the Internet, a seemingly impersonal piece of postmodern technology, turned out to be its unprecedented ability to bring creatures of flesh and blood closer together.

Six weeks ago, I referred to Robert J. Richards's 2005 Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture at the University of Chicago,"The Narrative Structure of Moral Judgment in History: Evolution and Nazi Biology." The traditional citation for it is: Richards,"The Narrative Structure of Moral Judgment in History: Evolution and Nazi Biology," University of Chicago Record, 39 (26 May 2005): 2-7. Thanks to Professor Richards for calling this to our attention in comments at Cliopatria.

Cliopatria delivers! After she urged the notorious pseudonymist, Acephalous, to step forth named in the world, he has done so. More than that, John Holbo's literary group blog, The Valve, has made an honest man of him by inviting Scott Eric Kaufman to join their group. No more pseudonymous surfing the academic blogosphere for him. Kaufman is an advanced graduate student in English at the University of California, Irvine. His current research interests are in American literary appropriations of evolutionary theory between 1890 and 1910. Congratulations both to Kaufman and The Valve!