What happens when your blog becomes “comment-driven” as opposed to “content-driven”? Pomomusings happens; for whatever reasons, over the past year or so, this blog has definitely become such a blog. Many people have emailed me and told me in person that I need to open the comments back up, because that is why they come to my blog. They say they like to see what fights are happening and what “dumb comments” people are leaving. While I admittedly think that controversy can be fun at times, and have also brought much of it on myself, this is never what this blog was set out to be. It began as an online forum to share ideas that related to postmodernism and Christianity that would eventually lead to a book with a good friend of mine. That lofty idea quickly became subsumed by all other demands in both of our lives (and the fact that we realized there may have been a few books already written on the subject).
I’d like to think that people would come here for the content – not to see what inane blog-fights were going on. But that is what has happened.
I think it’s ridiculous that one would even need to have a “Comment Policy” yet it was something that I felt was needed, although it didn’t help. I’m not entirely sure why this blog has been the “chosen one” amidst all the other blogs out there in the emergent-ish circle to serve as a place where people come to pick blog-fights. At any rate, it’s frustrating and honestly, it just takes up too much of my time to try and follow the comments, and pick out the ones that, according to the newly instituted comment policy, should be deleted, or are on the border. And then I do delete one and get emails from people about why it’s unfair that I deleted it, etc. It’s really not what I want to spend my time focusing on.
And yet I’m torn because I like hearing feedback from readers of the blog.
So, I don’t really know what I am thinking about comments right now. For now, I’m taking a break with them. Hopefully it will help me focus my attention on the actual content of this blog, and perhaps that will help the direction of pomomusings. It would be nice to bring comments back, and I may do so in a post every now and then, but for now – all you get is Adam’s stuff at pomomusings. Does it seem odd that a blog with a tagline of “journeying towards an open and progressive theology” would not allow open communication? Perhaps. I’m not exactly sure what to do with that paradox. But, I do know that I’m not a fan of the direction that this blog was heading.
And for those of you who only came here for the blog-fights, I’m sorry. E.S., I’m sorry that you’re going to have to go somewhere else to find some juicy and harsh online battles. I don’t know where to direct you. Perhaps you could go here and cause some ruckus…