Coward of the County?

I’ve discussed this in comments, but I think that it’s also worth a post. Mr. Gardner of Donklephant has repeatedly requested that someone from LGM give him a call in order to converse about the arc/crescent problem, and potentially about our attack on his particular concept of centrism. Since my time is valuable (there are episodes of Law and Order I’ve only seen six times), I haven’t taken him up on his offer, and I suspect that neither Scott nor Dave have, either.

Nonetheless, I find the request troubling for reasons other than my commitment to television. First, I suspect that the conversation would be genuinely pointless, as we have set out our best case and he has set out his. Justin seems to think that “a continuous, immediate dialogue is needed and that’s what a phone conversation can bring”, but I’ve talked to people on the phone before, and I’m unconvinced that the telephone is some sort of magical device that produces consensus. I suspect that this is a symptom of Mr. Gardner’s approach to blogging, which seems to be that a mealy-mouthed centrism is preferable to vigorous pluralism. I very much doubt that any argument can be made over the phone that can’t be made in electronic form.

More important, a phone call between bloggers really does defeat the purpose of, well, blogging. Blogging is a public sphere activity. People come, they read, they comment, they link, and they leave. Debates are held in the open, cases are put forward, arguments are made, answered, and improved upon. I would like to think that the LGM crew has put forth its best arguments, and I suppose it’s possible that Justin has put forth his best. Because this has happened in a public forum, there’s a chance that someone might have learned something, or some mind might have been changed. This discussion could spur someone else at some other blog to write an even more enlightening or convincing post, or (more likely) to unleash an amusing torrent of brutal sarcasm. In any case, the project of blogging is productive because of its public nature, not in spite of it. It follows that taking the debate private isn’t terribly helpful to the general blogging enterprise. In general, I don’t think that it’s terribly appropriate for bloggers to resolve their blogging differences in a private, rather than a public, setting. Now, this would be a bit different if the conflict involved two friends; everyone knows that Erik Loomis, for example, is a yellow bellied chickenhawk for not immediately volunteering for the US Army, but the constraints of friendship force me to rail against him in private while defending him in public. Nobody here knows Justin Gardner from Adam, however, so that constraint doesn’t apply.

I suppose that this is a long winded way of suggesting that publicly asking for a phone call to solve a blogging dispute is a violation of blog etiquette. It’s probably pointless anyway, and the request does a disservice to the blogosphere. Private requests for private communication are more defensible, and just all-around more sensible, really.