PrintBetween Tumblr, MySpace, LiveJournal, Twitter, and even Facebook, our generation has undoubtedly used the Internet to cultivate a culture of self-expression. But for the most part, this form of expression leads to introspection on blogs, rather than intellectual discourse. For Mary Borkowski, BC ’08, these isolated and anonymous online diaries constitute “the uglier side” of the internet.
Rather than waste time on self-reflection, Rachel Rosenfelt, BC '09, Jennifer Bernstein, BC '09, and Borkowski found themselves using their respective blogs as spaces to voice their thoughts and comments on literature, ideologies, and lectures. The three of them came up with the idea of a collaborative blog—the New Inquiry. “We all had our individual Tumblrs, and we were all putting up quotes on there, so we just decided to do it under one name,” Bernstein explains.
The forum that the New Inquiry (TNI) provides acts very much like an online notebook. A visit to the site reveals a series of posts, very similar to the format of other blogs, but with a fresher, more professional feel, ranging from topics such as David Foster Wallace’s writings to Lady Gaga. Unlike the average bloggers, however, the TNI team is constantly engaging with formal writings of well-known academics, as well as its own. Scott McLemee, a public intellectual and (recent) acquaintance of the three founders, heralds TNI as the starting point of “what criticism is going to look like in 10 years.”
Initially, first-time visitors to the site might be overwhelmed by the number of posts discussing the works of intellectuals, some familiar from University Writing and Contemporary Civilization, others more obscure. But the team is unphased by this reaction.
“If you’re going to choose to write about Rousseau, then yeah, of course you’re going to alienate a certain number of people, but that’s okay,” Bernstein states. Borkowski adds “People get intimidated because they think we’re so intellectual, but I mean, I’ve quoted Dr. Seuss on there.” Indeed, the posts are often accompanied by YouTube links and song lyrics that Rosenfelt, Bernstein, and Borkowski think are relevant to their discussion.
So what prompted the idea? Rosenfelt recalled a period during her junior year when, as a women’s studies major, she blogged about feminist theory. After reading a book by University of Chicago scholar Lauren Berlant, Rosenfelt wrote about her thoughts on the work and, to her surprise, her comments were discovered by the author herself. “I wrote a blog post about it… and then Lauren Berlant… found it, and she put it on her blog, and said, you know, let what this girl said stand for what I would say. And then… a graduate student at NYU put what I wrote on a class syllabus! So I was being read, academically, and you know, I was this little asshole junior at Barnard. … It opened my mind.”
The discovery that she did not need a PhD to be read and taken seriously by academics amazed her, giving her the confidence to continue expressing her thoughts in various online spaces.
More than that, however, was the TNI team’s annoyance at the fact that there was no “cross-pollination between departments” in academia, which Rosenfelt says she found “entirely inimical” to the discussion and development of ideas.
Before the website, the group had what they term “salons”—gatherings that closely resemble the symposiums of Plato’s works, where people meet to discuss an assigned topic over drinks. The trio see themselves as curators, not of art but of conversation, and the salons are the fruit of their initiatives. Their first salon was held over a year ago, and since then they have been gaining popularity. “We had to cap the guest list on the last one,” Borkowski says, in reference to the salon on the subject of conservatism.
When asked who exactly were on said guest lists, Rosenfelt stated, “Republicans, Democrats, artists… people who are intelligent and engaged.” Their previous symposium attracted a number of intellectuals associated with the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, and even a representative of the Huffington Post. The impressive guest list is not meant to put off others who are interested but may not be well read; of all the things the New Inquiry strives to cultivate, exclusivity is not one of them. Those who are interested need only keep their ears open for the next salon, and pursue the founders for details. “The price of entry is a bottle of wine per person,” Rosenfelt says good-naturedly.
The website, then, is an extension of the “salon” concept, and while it may be conservative—in the loose sense of the word—in content, the use of new media is the founders’ way of asserting that although print eventually be phased out, the manner in which subjects are traditionally presented in print should not.
Rosenfelt explains that TNI’s ultimate goal then is to “generate community” by encouraging people to voice their ideas: “We hate paralysis that so many people have. … You’re not going to write The Brothers Karamazov,” he says. “At the end of the day, maybe you’re a fuck-up, maybe you’re not as good a writer as you thought you’d be, but it doesn’t matter.”
If you want to learn more about the students’ endeavors, go to The New Inquiry.