Erin Manning goes Andrew Sullivan

By which I mean for the duration of Advent her blog will consist only of her posts, without comments.

Now I don't orbit by Erin's blog that often, mostly because the inside baseball Catholic stuff she usually posts about is simply outside my wheelhouse, but when I do, I read it for the comments, to the extent of ordering the posts I read by the number of comments they receive.

Why? Probably that basic human being social animal thing: it's the interaction among people that's the most interesting thing to me, not Erin Manning's sole thoughts in and of themselves (I don't know her, so why would I care what she thinks any more than I care about what anyone else I don't know thinks?) I'm interested in how the only objective measure of what she tried, the grasp and judgement of others, measures her success or failure from the beginning of whether she is even being articulate to the end of whether she has ended up being convincing or not. I'm interested in where her public thoughts fit into the multi-person human world, not in what she and Sullivan are now doing, tight-beaming their special individual mind dumps to Alpha Centauri.

When a blogger blogs without comments it seems to me they're saying a number of different things, either outright or implicitly:

1) I didn't have enough space anywhere at home to keep this private diary, so I'm using this public platform I stumbled across as a last-ditch makeshift workaround. If-ay I-yay ew-nay ig-Pay atin-Lay, I-Yay ould-way even-ay ite-wray it-tay ere-hay in-nay at-thay oo-tay eep-kay it-tay even-ay ore-may ecret-say, but I don't.

2) What I have to say is so important in its own right that it doesn't even matter if anyone reads it, so I don't need to know by way of someone commenting if anyone did read it or what they thought.

3) I already wrote 2) just now. Any comment could only spoil that, don't you agree? Don't answer.

One of the reasons Erin gives for her experiment in isolation is that there is a completely unknowable "depressingly large number of people in the world who feel free to put all sorts of sludge in your comment boxes," which suggests, a bit too facilely it seems to me, that anyone not positively reviewing Erin's output could be suspect of being an inhabitant of that vague and infinitely elastic purgatory.

But Erin is not Andrew Sullivan, so just as with her self-published book output - I think she just finished churning out her fifth or so 50,000 word manuscript in the series, the book(s) her mentor Rod Dreher has yet to even acknowledge exist - what she has effectively done is abandon her blogging now as well to the same sort of private self-publishing for that safely known audience of herself and anyone in her inner circle who considers her special enough that they will phone her or text her or email her personally about it.

This isn't really narcissism, it's more like a self-imposed sort of autism, and it seems to be a way of coping with the internet: people want to be noticed by the public, but only on their own, unilateral terms. So, in between isolated bursts of tight-beaming, they rock to and fro, in self-imposed isolation.

Frankly, it seems to me that a better course for anyone like Erin, even for a raging narcissist like Sullivan who, unlike Barbra, has only achieved first name status in-house, would be to take a closer look at why they are so allergic to the knowable public responses of others to their output.

If the comments Erin actually gets really is disproportionately a depressingly large amount of "sludge", what is she doing to generate those terrible results, and what could she do differently to achieve better ones?

If the problem is feeling rejected at anything short of adoration, that, too, begs for corrective action, action which can only be undertaken and guided in response to the very same feedback that is being preemptively rejected.

In short, a better experiment for Erin might be to explore in more depth why as a public author and blogger she seems to be having trouble getting along with her readers. Solving that social problem might put her further along the path to being a more successful author on top of being a happier blogger.

Yeah, I didn't link to Erin's experiment. Why would I? By her own hand, she's designated it as not really something for public interaction.

[NFP: But I am linking to Ms. Manning's post so I can see if it shows up in her "Links to this post" section. Mwa-ha-ha.]

[NFP2: In this context, NFP stands for Note From Pauli, not "Natural Family Planning". But you all knew that.]