Intellectual Property Law

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

By Siva Vaidhyanathan

Most blogs end abruptly. They are abandoned without warning. For example, this one from another Liz Losh is relatively typical of the genre.

Millions of blogs end in this way. Tens of millions. One day the author is pointing out the existence of feelings of wonder or overcommitment or angst (often in relationship to the Internet), and the next there is nothing but perpetual silence. The blog continues to exist in suspended animation after the last posting. The thought remains essentially unfinished; the expression is stopped almost mid-sentence. Those who stumble upon such blogs' mysterious contents can only regard them like so so much unclaimed luggage, clues to an absent owner who has long since left the scene.

Academic blogs are a notable exception. Perhaps it is because the professorial personality likes finality and wants to have a few pithy words at graduation. Michael Bérubé knew to say goodbye properly, first with a long posting and then with a YouTube video of orchestral nuclear annihilation. (The ending of that blog remains a source of personal unhappiness for me, by the way, since I still amaze people by correctly predicting the winner of Super Bowl each year.) Rationales are provided even for a pseudonymous blog. Even Dr. Crazy had to explain her departure. In true didn't-you-get-the-memo fashion Peter Krapp signed off with a top ten list. (Some of the video of Krapp's very definitive farewell is here.)

And yet, how much do these final rationalizations really tell the reader about the reasons for ending a blog. Does the suicide note really explain the suicide? Does the Dear John letter really explain the ending of the relationship?

Siva has given a number of excellent reasons for why this blog will be ending. The most important reason has to do with a fundamentally new attitude about publication in the age of social media. Many academic blogs, such as The Googlization of Everything, have become testing grounds for books, and places like the Institute for the Future of the Book understand and support this. My own blog for my own personal hobbyhorses about government institutions as media-makers, Virtualpolitik, has functioned in this way, and now that the book will actually be coming out in print, I have to figure out my blog's function as I begin to work on a second book about very different material.

Of course, I envy blogs like Ann's Feminist Law Professors, because it has a very clearly defined audience and a clearly defined voice. I don't see FLP writing its final blog postings any time soon.

I will certainly miss the comradery here, especially since -- thanks to my subscription to Sabres.com -- I am frequently reminded of the fact that I entered a collaborative writing community of digital rights activists who were fans of sport teams other than the Los Angeles Dodgers.

So, since I can't end with Stanley Kubrick-style armageddon, I would just say "So long, and thanks for all the fish."

Full post as published by SIVACRACY .NET on September 19, 2008 (boomark / email).