By C.B. Jansing
“Hey you, out there beyond the wall Breaking bottles in the hall Can you help me? Hey you, don't tell me there's no hope at all Together we stand, divided we fall”
These are the lyrics to "Hey You" by Pink Floyd, and, as I sit here to write my first piece for the Action Humanities blog (soon to be Action Academe, an expanded online community), they ring in my head. For, much like the speaker in the song, I’m not struggling with this question: “What should I tell everybody?” Rather, these questions are what haunt me: “Who is ‘everybody’”? “Who is reading this? and “Is this platform intimate enough?”
I’m justified in my concern. For instance, it strikes me as poignant that I didn’t even know about this fantastic blog until I was appointed Editor-at-Large. Our Action Humanities blog is filled with fascinating entries, whose topics cover everything from philosophy and art to humor and politics. Everything on this blog is well-edited and beautifully presented. Only one deformity mars this marvelous webpage.
Under every article thumbnail, there are two counters. One counts the number of “likes”, and the other counts the number of comments made for each post. Sadly, these poor counters don’t have much to do. Beneath nearly every article, the counters report this same data: 0 “likes” and 0 comments.
Data like this demands introspection. Is it we, the editors, who are the problem?
Perhaps.
Or maybe Tunxis is just too small of a school to be behind a successful blog. After all, obviously anyone with any real talent wouldn’t be at community college in the first place. If this is the case, then surely larger, more respected schools would have better readerships for their humanities blogs.
So, I set about finding schools of higher acclaim with which to compare our blog. According to US News & World Report, the top two undergraduate English programs in the USA are found at Yale and UC Berkeley. (They are tied for first place.) Thus, to see if my “school prestige” hypothesis was true, I checked out their humanities blogs.
I noticed just one main distinction between the “top” blogs and the Action Humanities blog. The “top” blogs are distinguished by their content. Let’s face it; their contributors are mostly distinguished professors and writers. While we have some brilliant thinkers and professors here at Tunxis, the Yale University Press humanities blog, for example, has the advantage of being able to publish selections of books which are being printed at their press. Tunxis, though underrated, obviously lacks a prestigious printing operation that can attract some of the best talent in the world for our blog. The UC Berkeley blog, on the other hand, bears a stronger resemblance to Action Humanities in terms of content, yet the research and polish evident in each of its posts are hard to match. However, difference in content does not imply a disparity of value. In fact, I prefer the Action Humanities blog.
One reason for this is that the Action Humanities blog does not suffer from the same constraints as do the “top” blogs. No one expects anything when they look at out our blog. Hence, instead of being dismayed by the lack of content regarding obscure French authors and cutting-edge scholarship in sociology, naïve readers, like me, can enjoy the varied, organized, and informative ramblings of the maddest people to ever grace Tunxis’ modest campus.
Nonetheless, one might wonder why I would bother drawing such a comparison. Of course, it seems obvious enough that a scrappy community college humanities blog is at a disadvantage when competing with the blogs of the most elite schools in the country. However, more surprising than the apparent incongruity between the blogs is the shocking similarity.
In fact, when checking out these “top” humanities blogs, I felt a sense of déjà vu. Their humanities blogs bear a striking resemblance to the Tunxis humanities blog.
Despite differences in content, the basic commonality is not too hard to spot. Across all the blogs in question, the little counters on the posts read the same. They all read zero. Zero likes; Zero comments. (UC Berkeley’s humanities blog editors may have been the most prudent by not including these little counters at all.) Without doing a detailed study of every humanities blog at every major school, I still feel confident enough to generalize that UC Berkeley’s humanities blog likely suffers from the same problem as the rest. (The issue is clearly not about the quality of content.)
So, the “top” two schools and Tunxis are all in the same boat with their humanities blogs. How can that be? Surely, it must just be that humanities blogs cover less relevant topics than school newspapers, and, therefore, garner less attention. Yet, go click on any article on the Yale Daily News website. It’s a shame. The same zeros stare back at me. The content on there is fantastic and every bit as good as a national news publication. Thus, quality still definitely can’t be the problem.
By this point, an especially observant reader may have already noticed that, on the Action Humanities blog, there is an additional counter that shows the number of views per article. Be that as it may, it is hidden; and the number of views indicated per article does little to put me at ease regarding this situation. (Publisher's Note: Part of the backstory here is the migration of archived content to our new Wix platform from the previous longtime Wordpress ecosystem. That said, Mr. Jansing's broader observations are still powerful and fitting commentary on a major—and disquieting—cultural trend.—J.I.A.) In fact, at the bottom of it all, there is a deeper problem.
The problem is this: people don’t care about college publications. Many people, I assume, look at college publications as analogous to minor league baseball. For them, it begs this same question: “Why would I watch minor league baseball when anyone who is good will eventually make it to the majors?” This is the wrong way to look at college publications. Writing is not like baseball. Baseball has a simple goal. The job of a ball player is to score points. The job of a writer, on the other hand, is much more difficult to pin down. Additionally, unlike baseball, writing is an activity in which nearly every literate person on the planet partakes daily. What’s more, literate people represent only a fraction of all the people on Earth who have something to say that’s worth reading.
Moreover, it is wrong to assume that a writer who is “any good” will eventually make it to the majors; likewise for baseball players. For example, it’s not hard to imagine a trailblazing essayist who only writes for their college rag before having to focus on a different priority. In the same way, one might imagine a potentially legendary baseball pitcher who plays only one season in the minors before deciding that golf is more fun. Easier to picture than either of these is the case of a gifted writer who would rather write for a college blog than market themself to a large publication.
College publications aren’t the minor leagues as such. They have a vibrancy of their own. Many great writers spend hours crafting unique ideas for them. Furthermore, the ideas expounded in college publications aren’t confined to merely the latest updates on campus activities. Often, they are themselves sufficient to bend our minds and force us to reconsider the most basic principles of our existence. One look at any article on the Action Humanities blog is evidence enough.
Despite my cynical account of the state of college publications, they continue to be published. Humanities blogs are continually filled with ever more interesting ideas and school papers are evermore filled with genius perspectives on pressing issues.
Allow me to bring it back to those Pink Floyd lyrics.
No matter how much it can feel like talking to a wall when sharing a piece and being met with those pesky zeros on the counters, I know that you (all ten of you) are “out there beyond the wall”. You’re here because you understand the oft-underestimated value of college publications. As for my concern about the intimacy of this platform, the sound of you “breaking bottles in the hall” by taking a chance on this content is intimacy enough for me. I mentioned earlier that I’m perhaps most troubled by the question, “Who is reading this?” Nevertheless, I know that you are reading this, and, as long as you keep reading, the great writers who will never “make it to the majors” will keep on writing. Hence,
“Together we stand, divided we fall.”
Photo: Wix Media
The views and opinions expressed herein and elsewhere on actionhumanites.com are solely those of the respective author(s) and do not necessarily reflect or represent those of Action Humanities (AH); AH's staff or community partners; Tunxis Community College; Connecticut State Colleges & Universities (CSCU); or the pending Connecticut Community College.
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