Reflections on blogging and the internet

Three and a half years ago, I read The Da Vinci Code. I had just finished college and I wanted something light and easy to read after the stress of honors exams. I had no idea that reading one book would lead to a number of exciting developments. Through blogging about Dan Brown, I've received a (retroactive) offer to contribute to a book, been cited in print, and (hopefully) convinced at least some people that Dan Brown is worthless when it comes to getting the facts right.

I didn't expect much from Dan Brown. But I had seen so many people reading it on the train that I figured it had at least some redeeming qualities, if only as a good commuting book. I wasn't at all prepared for quite how bad it was or how emotional my response to it would be.

That emotional response led me to writing a long series of blog posts on Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, and Angels and Demons that culminated in a list of errors in Angels and Demons. That list is still receiving comments and additions, nearly three years after its initial publication. While working for the Harvard College Library last year, I came across a French book on Angels and Demons that, lo and behold, drew on and cited my blog.

To this day, any number of google searches on Dan Brown will return my blog as the top result: Dan Brown errors, Dan Brown mistakes, Angels and Demons errors, and Angels and Demons inaccuracies will all bring you straight to my blog post. I view this as my most significant accomplishment with respect to Dan Brown. If I've convinced anyone that Dan Brown is full of shit, I've succeeded. My biggest complaint about Dan Brown's books is how they present themselves as factual. People buy into Dan Brown's claims of solid research. They need to be disabused of that idea, and my blog has, I think, helped do that.

Everything else that's come as a result of my Dan Brown has been a bonus. I was shocked to receive e-mails from the authors of The Da Vinci Hoax and gratified to find them receptive to my critiques. I was flabbergasted by linguist Geoffrey Pullum's short but telling compliment. And I was beyond proud to stumble upon my first citation in print.

My surprise at all these developments came from the very novelty of internet communication in general and blogging in particular. A number of blogging's features made my series of posts on Dan Brown successful beyond my wildest hopes. Chief among these are quick dissemination of information to a huge audience, facilitated communication between author and audience, and continued stability and availability of posted material. Throw in the ease and speed of e-mail and you've got a communication system that flows much more quickly and smoothly than was ever possible in the pre-blogging era.

The potential audience of a blog post is practically limitless. According to the CIA World Factbook, over 1 billion people worldwide have internet access. Not all of them read English, of course, nor do all of them read blogs. But it not a stretch to say that an individual blog post could, in theory, be read by over 100 million people. This would far outstrip the 60 million copies of The Da Vinci Code that have been sold worldwide. Dan Brown's readership is, of course, significantly larger than mine. The number of people who read my list of errors in Angels and Demons runs in the thousands or, perhaps, the tens of thousands. But the fact remains that anyone in the world with internet access could read my work.

That leads to another one of blogging's key features. It costs you nothing to read a blog and almost nothing to publish one. Blogging is practically free, both for the reader and the author. Access is almost immediate; type in an address and the blog will appear in a matter of seconds. Getting access a book requires time and money (or, at least, library membership). Accessing a blog costs you nothing.

Blogs' high level of accessibility would be worthless without some way of finding the material you're interested in. Search engines like google obviously play a crucial role in finding what you're looking for. The vast majority of the early readers of my post on the errors in Angels and Demons found it through google searches.

But as time passed, links from other blogs and websites became increasingly important sources of traffic to my blog. The first of these links came from the history blog Cliopatra. With a daily readership in the hundreds, Cliopatra can drive a lot of readers to your site. Links to my blog have appeared on dozens of other of blogs as well as in the Wikipedia article on Angels and Demons. The importance of hypertextuality to blogs and the internet in general cannot be overemphasized. Without links, the internet is just a morass of information. With them, trusted sources reinforce the credibility of each other and a network of respectable resources on a given topic organically develops over time. Without links from other blogs, my work on Dan Brown would never have gained the prominence that it has.

The interactive nature of blogging is best exemplified in one of the features that most clearly distinguish blogs from most other websites: commenting. Not all blogs allow comments, but the vast majority do. Comments set blogs apart from static websites. The quality of the commentariat can vary considerably from blog to blog. For most blogs, like mine, most posts don't even receive any comments. On most political blogs, many comments fall into variations on "You're brilliant!" and "You're stupid!" Commenters on academic blogs tend to adopt a slightly more elevated tone.

The comments on my post on the errors in Angels and Demons far outstrip every other blog post I've ever written. As of today, there have been 297 comments. Though some are critical of the project, most comments enthusiastically point out further errors in Dan Brown's work. Most of the errors I pointed out dealt with history and the art of Rome, two things I know a lot about. Commenters have brought to light a number of other major errors, a number of them scientific in nature. Just as Wikipedia combines the knowledge of millions of contributors, blog posts like mine on Angels and Demons can effectively aggregate and compile the expertise of a large community.

Blog posts, especially high-traffic ones, are works in progress. Already in December 2007 commenters have pointed out several more mistakes in Brown's descriptions of Rome. Blog posts have the ability to remain vital and vibrant even years after their initial publication. Unlike books and journal articles, blogs, by their very nature, keep the conversation going. And, as previously discussed, blogs remain easily accessible, right at the fingertips of anyone with an internet connection.

Compared to the collaborative achievement that is my blog post and its accompanying comments, a few e-mails from other authors who have written about Dan Brown feel rather anti-climactic. But they also represent how the internet has changed scholarly communication. Ten years ago, if I had a book like The Da Vinci Hoax, I would have simply swallowed my disagreements and continued on my way. But thanks to blogging, I had a forum to lay out those disagreements. Within days, I had heard from both authors of The Da Vinci Hoax, who thoughtfully responded to my critiques. After a few more e-mails back and forth, we all gained a more nuanced understanding of our respective positions. I came to recognize that Olson and Miesel had a more sophisticated understanding of history than I gave them credit for. And they came to see that Dan Brown wasn't quite the relativist they claimed him to be.

Discussions like these weren't impossible before e-mail, of course, but they were much more difficult. Before the internet, I would have had no easy way of contacting the authors of a book published by a small press. Even if I did have their real-world addresses, I doubt I would have taken the time to write out a letter. And if I had, I wouldn't have expected a response for weeks. Instead, the entire discussion took place in a matter of days. By lowering (and practically eliminating) the barriers to communication, e-mail makes conversations like the one I had with Olson and Miesel significantly easier. While some decry the atomizing influence of the internet ("Losers sitting in their pajamas staring at their computers for hours!"), the ease of e-mail has actually facilitated communication between people who would never come into contact before.

So there you have it. Blogging and e-mail have opened up all sorts of new ways of disseminating information and communicating with other scholars. Without my blog, I would have just railed angrily against Dan Brown to all my friends (which I still did plenty of). But with blogging, I had an opportunity to share my frustrations with a larger community and participate in what turned out to be a collaborative effort in debunking Angels and Demons. Between e-mail and blogging, scholarly communication and the dissemination of information will never be the same.