Caracas Chronicles

Juan is right. Comments-via-Email probably does run counter to some deeply ingrained Venezuelan cultural values. That’s a singularly bad reason to oppose it, though, just like Venezuelans’ deep cultural attachment to cheap gas is a terrible reason to oppose a gas price hike.

A good deal of what’s deeply ingrained in Venezuelan (or any other) culture happens to be bullshit – and this affectation of radical intellectual egalitarianism strikes me as a key example: one important aspect of the proverbial por eso es que estamos como estamos.

I come to bury deeply ingrained BS, not to praise it.

Now, is the Sullivan model viable for a straight, elitist, Venezuelan-turned-Canadian snob?

I don’t know.

That’s not just some rhetorical crouch, a politico’s dodge to avoid telling an angry mob that Comments-via-Email are here to stay. I genuinely don’t know how the dynamic of the blog is going to evolve under the new system. I don’t know if we’ll get enough postable email to keep the community vibe going. I don’t know if the overall reading experience is going to improve or deteriorate. I don’t know if readership figures are going to increase or decrease. I don’t know if we’ll have more, better discussions or fewer, worse ones.

One thing I do know is that a blog is a living, breathing entity. It seems kind of crazy to me to try to decide if the new system works or not before you’ve seen it in action. Until we give it a few days to settle and readers get a chance to try out the new feel of it, to experience its joys and miseries first hand, how can you possibly tell which outweighs which?

So I’m proposing a kind of moratorium on comments-about-comments. Let’s just put this debate in amber for a couple of weeks and return to it when we have some basis for judgment. Until we do, I don’t really see the use of it…