Onwards?

I'm fully aware of the degree to which my blog has "dropped off," presumably both in volume as well as in quality. It raises some questions about the medium itself, but also about habit.

For in the most fundamental sense, blogging is about habit. For me, it's less about finding interesting articles and having interesting thoughts--and, more about waking up each morning, and feeling compelled to share them. My spring semester has precipitated scheduling changes that shift my days to an afternoon focus. It's remarkable how much of a difference it makes.

On another level, however, I can't but question whether the blogger's block I've started to encounter is endemic of my increasing socialization into academia. I still skim the washingtnopost.com and NYT every morning (with a typical focus on op-eds), but gone are the days when I'd also read the entire WSJ op-ed page. Has my interest in punditry diminished? I suppose--for the time being--so.

But there's a larger change at hand, I think: one that I stumbled into this weekend when trying to casually "talk politics" with a mutual friend. I tried to explain my increasing apathy about partisanship, as my own affiliations (and, to some extent, even ideological tenets) transformed into an internal rolodex of public opinion studies and social psychology.

My friend talked about the bellicose posturing of cable news networks like Fox News and MSNBC, lamenting individuals' ability to expose themelves to contrasting opinions. I thought about interpersonal communication, and how contact with individuals with contrasting points of view increases political participation, but not neccessarily tolerance (Mutz). Or, of the fact that while individuals who like news are watching more of it, and self-selecting to ideologically similar stations, the shift away from broadcast news has allowed an even more substantial portion of the population to eschew news and politics altogether (Prior).

Want to talk about the Obama campaign? Did you know that studies at Princeton and the University of Michigan indicate that text messages can boost voter turnout by up to 4%?

I supposed I've just written this entry to "reframe" my own goals for this blog. It seems inevitable (and for the best) that my interests will become stripped of any partisan overtones. Likewise, the majority of my thoughts will be preoccupied with the articles and analysis that occupy my days.

I suppose that one useful goal, and a practice in good writing, would be to translate academic jargon into realistic ideas, using news stories as examples or points of reference to illustrate studies I've read for school. A secondary goal would be to use academic articles as motivations to diligently stay abreast of the current affairs in the news--something that is easier to neglect than I'd like to admit.

Does anyone care? Probably not. It's an uphill battle. We'll see how I fare.