Are Weblogs Changing Our Culture?
Slate is hosting a conversation between journalist Kurt Anderson and Andrew Sullivan (of Andrewsullivan.com weblogging fame. Yesterday’s posts (which are bizarrely framed as emails — wouldn’t a blog tool have been more appropriate) frame the discussion, which has continued today (and presumably will continue the rest of the week).
Today, Sullivan said:
Blogger NZBear weighs in as well, in a meta-meta-blog on this meta-blog. He writes: “Slate should have provided a counterweight to his journablogging heavyweight status. Picking a non-journalist, lesser known blogger to complete a trifecta with Andersen and Sullivan would have made the discussion deeply more interesting.” But here’s another piece of blogging’s genius. We just did that! You can rectify editorial choices in real time all the time. If this conversation takes off, we can even continue it without Slate at all!
This is remarkably similar in attitude, if not in phrasing, to Ray Ozzie’s essaylet of a few weeks ago about the “rebirth of public discussion.”
I have the same problem with Sullivan’s response as I have with Ozzie. Weblogs may be public, but “public” does not necessarily translate to inclusive. In contrast to Sullivan and Ozzie, I would argue that the “individualism” of weblogs, technologically represented in the lack of a standard way to discover and reference other weblogs that are commenting upon a post, replicates — or at least has the potential to replicate — the exclusiveness of traditional media.
Because weblogs are decentralized (as opposed to, for example, threaded discussion forums), without an effective means to discover the other components to the conversation (i.e. other blogger’s posts), the the original blogger writes in isolation and only includes other voices as he/she sees fit. Sound like any traditional media you know?
Sullivan apparently revels in this. He says:,
“The one wonderful thing about blogging from your laptop is that you don’t have to deal with other people. You can broadcast alienated, disembodied, disassociated murmurings into a people-free void. You don’t have to run something past an editor, or frame your argument to an established group of subscribers. You just say what the hell you want.
What I read in that, though, is “I don’t have to be accountable.” Sure, a bevy of other bloggers might correct him — or agree with him. However, like with traditional media, there is no mechanism (short of including a comments feature in your blog, which Sullivan doesn’t) for those bloggers to “insert” their responses, or even hypertextual references to their responses, into the conversation in a way that Sullivan’s readers can view the whole discussion.
NZBear’s point was that Sullivan and Anderson excluded any other voices from the conversation other than their own . . . and in pointing that out, NZBear gave Sullivan the opportunity to illustrate the exclusion. Sullivan implies that by quoting NZBear, they’ve provided a “counterweight.” But he doesn’t point out that it’s a counterweight that he hand-selected. What about the rest of the responses to Sullivan & Anderson that either haven’t been discovered by the authors . . . or have been purposefully excluded.
Big deal, you say. But as with traditional media, this exclusivity has the potential to result in propaganda.
The solution? I’m not sure there is a perfect one yet. I think weblogging technology needs to evolve to a point where it includes a mechanism for automated discovery of other referencing weblog posts that’s better than referral logs, Blogdex, DayPop, and TrackBack. (TrackBack seems to be coming close.) The web itself may have to evolve to allow for that, but perhaps weblogs can be the driver for that change.