At times I find it hard to write here.
First there’s the time commitment. I maintain my own blog, with a post or two per day, I try to write for my student newspaper’s opinion every couple of weeks, I have a club to keep running, outreaching to other regional clubs, maintaining campaigns, planning a week’s worth of events in January for my engineering club, participating in off-campus groups and events, keeping myself fed and my apartment clean, and on top of all that, actually putting some time and effort into school. But after several years of university, I’ve learned the art of time management versus procrastination. There is always time to write (I’m writing this from class right now).
Next, there’s the scale of the writing. Oftentimes, Edger gets a vast amount of in depth, long articles. They’re well-written and cover a lot of philosophical and scientific ground. However, my writing style isn’t always akin to that. Sometimes I just want to post a link (which I do from time-to-time when I find interesting ones that aren’t covered yet), other times (like this) I feel like just rambling until I feel like I’ve made my point (read: I never proof read my work, it just kind of flows from my head). Basically, I’m saying that I doubt that I’ll ever be writing long philosophical treatises here (but kudos to those who do). Although, again, this doesn’t really prevent me from contributing short articles frequently.
What I think is my current biggest stumbling block is the issue of audience.
I’ve written on most of the religion topics before. I’ve read most of them again and again and again. It’s sometimes refreshing to see a new take on a familiar issue, but that’s a rare gem in a sea of redundancy. I also assume that most of the readers (and definitely the authors) here are in the same boat.
There are a few articles that go up here that stir the pot, addressing global warming, nuclear energy, and other somewhat controversial, but secular topics, that for a short term spark some interest, but for those to become the norm would be to remove the original goals of Edger.
So what we end up with, is a sort of secular circle jerk of preaching to the same old choir. (I realize the sad irony that this issue has likely been written on on countless blogs before). Whereas my writings for The Gateway reach an broad audience of upwards of 30,000 students (who don’t all agree with me), and even my blog (since my blast of political posts through the election) reaches a range from secularists to socialists to physics aficionados (and most importantly, my friends).
Yet for the time being, I’ll continue begrudgingly contributing to Edger, hoping that in some way we can break free from a base audience of tech-savvy “New Atheists” and routinely reach the greater public. The only problem being, I have no clue how we do that.
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To answer part of your question Ian, soon we’ll be undergoing a major revamp here in which will start to focus more on issues outside of our normal “circle of jerking.” We want it to be evident what we’re fighting for but not just talk about those issues. If we truly want to make a difference we need to make it more than just an in-group community.
The way forward, Ian, is to write from one’s own experience. While we can all share experiences that have elements in common, the pleasure of the sharing is in the different details. It is the uniqueness of our own perspectives that allows our thought to be heard over the din of blogosphere.
Still, I appreciate the dilemma. Living in Canada has the benefit of a certain lack of demagoguery in public affairs, and so there is often a lack of material to fuel the outrage that a good blog post often needs. Here in Montreal, one of the most secular places in North America, I am keenly aware of both the struggle for the secular soul of democracy in many parts of the west, and of the lack of such struggle right here where I live.
Perhaps we could band together and create a charity that would air-drop secular humanism to trouble spots across the world.
i’ve been advocating for a long time to get people to break out of their little shells. what i find the most frustrating is that when i write something that the choir doesn’t like i get spit on, lashed out at… etc. It’s pretty difficult to write something that doesn’t go with the regular flow when everyone who is reading is so stuck in their ways.
You know Roy asked me if I wanted to contribute? He is very slow to follow through. In the mean time, I have been worrying about what I’d actually write. Edger’s audience and contributors certainly seem very… mainstream. You’ve made me feel a little better about it.
‘Twould be great if you could encourage more reader input. You know, so that the “current comments” aren’t completely dominated by the site’s own contributors.
The Gateway publishes it’s articles online as well as in print on my campus, but writers don’t get the ability to respond to comments online. Perhaps we could follow that here (I mean really, if you didn’t get your point across in the article, why did you click publish)?
The “secular circle jerk” phrase was merely to raise some eyebrows. I didn’t mean to offend.
Yeah I really believe we need to speak about more than just religion here. We should have specific sections for say politics, nature, physics, environment, popular media etc over just news and commentary.
Well, I didn’t mean that the site’s contributors should stop commenting, just that they shouldn’t be the only ones commenting. Have some open-ended posts that explicitly ask for replies. Or attach a discussion to each of your polls. I don’t know.
i agree totally. I’m going to stop posting about religion and the like and start posting 100% about science (paleontology/geology specifically) and environmental stuff. i think we should all take on a role like this. write about religion when we need to – but have other areas that we write about too, more regularly.
Well in the plan that is being worked out Edger would be separated into different sections. Instead of “news, comments, features, featured, media” we’d have “science, atheism, human rights, politics, and maybe humanism, and maybe even entertainment). We’re going to turn everything on its head and comment on many things from a reality based perspective and not just stick to what’s already within our discussion about the reality based world (religion, atheism, science). There’s no problem with occasionally preaching to the choir either. We all see that as a negative, but in small doses it’s quite positive…calls to action like Tauriq and I often post I think are more than just preaching to the choir…they’re telling you to get active, get involved, and make a difference.
Also, we’ll be expanding our writing staff. As of now we just have some columnists. We’re going to set up regulations so people can contribute occasionally, and others (the columnists) will still focus on posting often. This will result in more posts, more participation, and more awesomeness.
I think it was important that we started Edger out as just preaching to the choir because we already had a built in audience in which all of us writers could easily promote to. You can look at our page visits and see that they’ve become quite static aside from the occasional spike, and I don’t think we’ll really start to expand until we reach out.
I agree, sometimes the choir does need preaching too. But I like the ideas and am glad to hear them.
If nothing else, every once in a while I’m going to aim to write some article to stir it up so this site doesn’t get stale.
A major alternative issue for discussion: Internet bandwidth throttling. There have been some movements toward having website transfer speeds (which are a function of bandwidth) come at a prices of a scale of which increasing wealth would be needed to run websites that allow for quick loading. This destroys net-neutrality. Right now, The Edger and any old blog will nice and fast just like the websites of the New York Times, CNN, Fox, Microsoft or any other rich corporation. If net neutrality is destroyed, the lowly blogger’s site loading could be brought to a snail’s crawl while Fox News, NBC News, and AT&T’s websites continue to load at fast speeds. The result: the Internet – a proven significant aid to democracy – will be converted into a social/political peer of television and print media: With the grand majority of available and consumed information being provided by a small pocket of uber-rich and uber-powerful people whose interests are often greatly at odds with those of the average person.
This is a positively massive issue.
Net neutrality is something I’m sure everyone here at Edger would support. Check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
|http://www.eff.org/