Sunday, March 07, 2004
David Weinberger
How to Save the World: "In his recent article in Salon, David Weinberger responds to suggestions that the blogosphere is an echo chamber: Cliques of like minds parroting each other and nodding virtually, cementing their unenlightened perpectives and ignoring different points of view. David makes two important points:
Don't bring your toys to this dogpark!
A conversation is a social group, and social groups serve many social functions. Some are debating groups. Some are places for people to show how clever they are. Some aim at political change. Very few aim at changing minds about the founding agreement, if only because it's so hard to pull up the planks of conversation as we walk on them. The comment blog of a presidential candidate is not about changing minds, any more than is the Red Sox rooting section. It's about forming a political movement. It binds supporters socially. It keeps their enthusiasm up. It lets them collectively work out interpretations and feelings within a group of people they trust precisely because of their shared agreement. Likewise for the right-wing sites. Likewise even for extraterrestrial-conspiracy mailing lists.
If you want to see a real echo chamber, open up your daily newspaper or turn on your TV. There you'll find a narrow, self-reinforcing set of views. The fact that these media explicitly present themselves as a forum for objective truth, open to all ideas, makes them far more pernicious than some site designed to let people examine the 8,000 ways Hillary is a bitch or to let fans rage about how much better Spike was on 'Buffy' than he'll ever be on 'Angel.' And if you want to see the apotheosis of the echo chamber -- the echo echoing itself so perfectly that it comes perilously close to achieving the 60-cycle om of the empty mind -- consider a president who, rather than read the newspaper, is happy to have his aides pick and choose what headlines he learns mor"
Don't bring your toys to this dogpark!
A conversation is a social group, and social groups serve many social functions. Some are debating groups. Some are places for people to show how clever they are. Some aim at political change. Very few aim at changing minds about the founding agreement, if only because it's so hard to pull up the planks of conversation as we walk on them. The comment blog of a presidential candidate is not about changing minds, any more than is the Red Sox rooting section. It's about forming a political movement. It binds supporters socially. It keeps their enthusiasm up. It lets them collectively work out interpretations and feelings within a group of people they trust precisely because of their shared agreement. Likewise for the right-wing sites. Likewise even for extraterrestrial-conspiracy mailing lists.
If you want to see a real echo chamber, open up your daily newspaper or turn on your TV. There you'll find a narrow, self-reinforcing set of views. The fact that these media explicitly present themselves as a forum for objective truth, open to all ideas, makes them far more pernicious than some site designed to let people examine the 8,000 ways Hillary is a bitch or to let fans rage about how much better Spike was on 'Buffy' than he'll ever be on 'Angel.' And if you want to see the apotheosis of the echo chamber -- the echo echoing itself so perfectly that it comes perilously close to achieving the 60-cycle om of the empty mind -- consider a president who, rather than read the newspaper, is happy to have his aides pick and choose what headlines he learns mor"
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