Via Kevin Drum comes news from Althouse that the most emailed article at the the Atlantic Monthly magazine this week is Jonathan Rauch’s essay “Caring for Your Introvert.” I’ve written about Rauch’s essay before, and I find it amusing that it would make anybody’s “most emailed” list. Maybe there are more of us out there than any of us realized. Of course, it’s hard for us to find each other. We’re too quiet.
As I’ve said before, I always register as a classic introvert on any test intended to determine type. I’d generally prefer to be in a small group instead of a big crowd, and by myself is even better under some circumstances. In social situations, I’ll stick to a few people I know rather than plunging into the crowd. In meetings, unless I have a particular role to play that requires speaking up, I’m likely to do more listening than talking. (Though part of this is I always try to remember the maxim “better to keep silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”)
Kevin has an interesting theory about bloggers and introversion.
I would guess that the blog community tends toward introversion, since my experience is that extroverts tend to have limited patience with reading and even less with writing. On the other hand, perhaps blogs, which specialize in tiny chunks of polemic, are actually the perfect medium for extroverts.
When I read the first sentence I thought it was a load of crap. Bloggers more introverted? Not in my experience. But then I read the second sentence I began to think that maybe my experience is a bit unique. In the past year or so, I tend to find myself in the company of more political bloggers, most of whom don’t come across to me as introverts. If anything, the upper spheres of political bloggerdom are top heavy with extroverted “alpha bloggers,” in the worst tradition of the “alpha male.” When I find myself among them, half the time I hang back and don’t bother trying to make myself heard, unless there’s a rare lull in the conversation.
I think the reason I find myself in that position is because, like others of my persuasion, over the years I’ve worked my way closer to the line between introversion and extroversion. In a sense, I’ve learned to be more extroverted because in a world of extroverts (I still think there are more of them than there are of us) you pretty much have to force yourself into extroversion — even if it isn’t your natural way of being — just to be heard above the din. The problem is that for us it takes work, despite how naturally it comes to others. In a sense, an introvert has to work twice as hard in order to be heard half as much.
Anyway, it’s funny coming from Kevin. At least to me, because I count him as one of the extroverted “alpha bloggers.”
