How Blogging Affects Your Worldview

My interview with Jennie Rothenberg Gritz at the Atlantic is now up. The interview covers a lot of ground. One nugget:

Do you think you’d feel restless if you were sitting on the sidelines, watching the online medium continue to evolve?

Who knows? But the nice thing about the Web is that it is so obviously its own organic being. You contribute to it, but you don’t control it. And you don’t want to control it. I like that about it. I think it’s actually changed my politics a little bit. I think I’ve become more libertarian as I’ve understood this medium.

That’s interesting. Your politics have changed because of the nature of the medium itself?

Yes, I’ve become more skeptical of doctrines and more skeptical of ideology and more skeptical of dogmatism. Including my own, occasionally. I think that my faith life, for example, has become more deconstructed than it was and has allowed me to entertain doubt more thoroughly.

But of course, it also helps to have been fantastically wrong about the Iraq War, the most important decision made in national life in a long time, and to have spent the last five years accounting for that and trying to explain that and understand it better. I think my readersI hope, anywayforgive me for some of that, as long as I’m candid and honest about it.

The task of talking out loud about one’s own mistakes is a very helpful thing to do. I think it’s more helpful than pretending you know everything and proclaiming every now and again from some high horse what the truth is. Blogging is a whole new way of writing, and a new way of experiencing the world. It’s very real and very human.