The blogosphere vs. human nature
Jeff Jarvis is talking about the disillusionment of some, who expected something quite different from the blogosphere than the way things seem to have worked out.
I define blogs now as people in conversation. It’s that distributed conversation Matt and Ken taught me about. Some people are thinking with the open-minded discipline Matt yearns for. Others are closed-minded black holes. That’s life. No medium is going to change that human nature. But it is exhilerating that we get to hear new voices of more people now — people like Matt.
I think that once you get past the general-interest or political blogs, you find something else, something that’s more in tune with a revolution in media. While it’s true you are going to see a reaction to, and a coloring of, just about every issue in line with the general political stance of the blogger, if you can get past the big names, what you may find are blogs that focus more on one issue. Then if you look at a whole conversation on a subject, through their links and those who are talking about them, (using something like Technorati or Del.icio.us,) you can get a lot of “sides” of an issue.
It’s not the bloggers themselves who are being more open-minded, it’s the system itself, which has the ability to both collect a lot of statements and reveal them, in a totally objective way, since it’s an automated system that has no opinion.
That’s why tags are so important, and so helpful. Before tags, what you got if you looked at Technorati was a bunch of blogs talking about and linking to a blogger. So it was the blog that was important, rather than the subject matter. (Most bloggers don’t bother to link to those who disagree with them, even if that is considered proper to do so.) Tags now give you the subject, and you can get a pretty good overview of an issue a lot more quickly than you could without them.
Sure, there’s still a lot of “echo-chamber” stuff going on, but in all that there are going to be some gems, a few original ideas here and there. The blogosphere gives everybody their chance to have their say, when ten years ago, or maybe even five, there was no way your average Joe could express an opinion – particularly an unpopular one – without going through a series of filters and doing a lot of work to get that word out. Average Joe had to know somebody, or have a lot of money for publication costs.
In many years of activism for a variety of causes, the one constant I’ve found is that most people don’t give a flying flamingo about my issue. (Whatever that issue may be.) Yet when presented with the facts in a way that’s neither difficult nor expensive, those same people quickly form an opinion. Even better if they can form that opinion on their own, in their own time.
Everybody has, pretty much, just one or two things they care enough about to really look into. When they do choose to look into something, the availability is there. Even though it’s still referred to as “information overload,” because not everybody has developed the skill of discernment yet, that sheer volume of stuff is necessary and important. People are still unique individuals who have a need for all different kinds of information.
Some people become experts in their little niche, and so that’s what they write about.
I’m not disillusioned at all about the way things are going, in fact, I just keep finding more things to get excited about. The point is that everything is there where somebody can find it. People aren’t going to be any more open-minded or democratic than they ever were, but the technology is purely objective in a way only technology can be. We just need to learn how to work with it, and that takes time.