I’d like to have a place on the Internet where I can go and talk hard core theory, strategy and tactics. Where reflection is central to political discourse. I’d like to be challenged, and to challenge others. And I’d like to be part of learning community that is driven by creation – and not reaction.
The Internet is a wonderful way to get ideas out there. It allows ordinary folks to reach thousands of others, and that is a wonderful thing. But the Internet fills up with garbage quickly. Even when a site is dedicated to self-regulation, one person’s treasure is garbage to someone else.
The larger a community becomes, the more reflective of a commercial enterprise the community will become. This is because commercial enterprises (up until recently) are driven by the marketplace. The theory of marketing is that your organization (corporation) will make the most money when it develops products and services that give the market what it wants.
You want lots of people to read a diary? The Internet market seems to like these elements:
- Timely (as in the “first to report that the commercial media has reported something)
- Emotionally charged (fear, disgust, anger and joy are the biggies)
- Stylish — conforms to the blog style
- Appeal to authority — either by citing an authority, being about an authority, reporting on the commercial media’s reporting, or by being a well-known writer
Perhaps most important is that you need to get people to react. The Internet seems like its media-niche is going to be based almost entirely on the principles of behaviorism and addiction. Through intermittent reinforcement (charge of emotion or recognition of a comment or point), the blogger medium can be very addictive. This addictive nature of the blogging medium is totally unlike any other text-media (except, perhaps, porn). Successful sites have learned how to plug into this principle – I suspect largely through trial and error and “natural selection.”
The consequences of this are not mundane. When considering the role that “heavy users” have in filtering information through blogs and viral email campaigns, and when adding to this the additional role of light users who either forward or read a tidbit based on the emotional charge we have replaced professional editors and information gatekeepers with a massive addiction-based and emotionally-charged system. As the commercial media looks more and more to blogs for news, this new filtering system is taking over much of our information dissemination.
What’s great about the Internet is that it doesn’t matter that all of this is going on, for you (or me) to get a lot of good stuff from the Internet. The Internet allows each user to self-select, to exist in discrete parallel information spaces – allowing the serious reader seeking complexity and challenge to co-occupy the space with someone looking for a good time, someone in serious Internet addiction mode, and someone just passing through. While the overall system may be changing how information is moved into the national spotlight, people can still go into all of the corners and secret hideaways to find there own spaces of interest.
I am not interested in attacking blogs and blogging in general. I find this medium very interesting – and I learn and take great pleasure in it. But I would like to have a niche where more thoughtful, and less reactive, discussion is going on. Perhaps we can make this little spot that place. I, for one, am curious and will stick around to see what happens.
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Random other thought: I really think that those of us who post on dKos as well should be generally not cross-posting at the two sites. I, for one, will be writing unique material at both sites and think that will make both places better.
Agree with you on the caffinated “wow – look at this!” internet-rush dynamic. It does get a little old.
What I like about this site right now is that it doesn’t have that baggage…yet. I expect that to change, tho, as it grows.
“wow – look at this!” = Matt Drudge = FOX = CNN = MSNBC = KOMOKIROKINGKONG(yes, it’s a station too)
Tom & Granny…what took you guys so long?…So glad you guys crossed over and are writing great stuff to post over her. btw/ Tom..several of us were worried about you over on kos when you disappeared for a couple of weeks. DianeL let me know you were ok…Isn’t it great here at BooTrib.
It took we 5 seconds from reading the email alerting me to the site to logging in and signing up. I just didn’t know until yesterday.
The larger a community becomes, the more reflective of a commercial enterprise the community will become.
Not inherently. Wikipedia is not like that. Project Gutenberg is not like that. The Open Directory Project is not like that. Slashdot is not like that. OhMyNews is not like that. Apache development is not like that. Linux development is not like that.
It is a category error to talk about “The Internet” as “A Market”, just as it would be an error to talk about the planet Earth as a market.
And new, commons-based peer production phenomena like Open Source and Open Publishing prove that quality, constistency and service can be provided completely outside the classic economic mechanisms of corporate hierarchies competing in commercial markets.
There is nothing inherent in large-scale online communities that requires a collapse into market mendacity. The fact that some large communities like dailykos lose much of the small-town charm when they grow is NOT an inherent characteristic of networked communities, it is a failure of particular design that does not take social-network-dynamics into account.
This place could grow to ten time the size of dailykos and, if properly architected, would not lose the sense of community and constructive dialog.
Final thought: although lots of pundits and many pitching book-ideas like to analyze what blogs and blogging and the blogosphere are all about, the truth is that this is an infant phenomenon, not even out of the womb, and to speculate about what its taste in fashion is going to be when it has moved out of the house, married, raised a couple kids and bought a minivan, is rather hubristic and futile. If you believe, as I do, that blogging is here to stay (though probably mutating significantly from its current nascent form), then patience and observation are called for over prognostication and pronouncements.
It’s going to be a long, strange trip, and anyone who pretends to know where we’re headed, no matter how impressive and confident they sound, is making it all up.
In my opinion.
You’re right. It is difficult to talk about the “Internet” in general terms. It is even hard to talk about “blogs” in those terms. This was my first attempt at getting precise about this line of thinking.
I do think that an entertainment and/or addiction filter is really messing up how information is distributed, and this concerns me. I think that an illusion of active citizenship is (a) be used to get money for organizations and (b) may result in an even less engaged civic life for for our republic.
One of the early naive mistakes made by Internet pioneers was to assume that the networked system itself would, merely by being different, spur positive change.
While the transformative potential of open communication networks is real, it turns out that we humans must, as always, take responsibility for how a new technology is used. Like powerful technologies that preceded them, group-forming networks like the Internet can fuel a new civilization, or they can blow ours up.
You might be interested in an article I wrote on the subject of how to use network dynamics and the open development ethos for positive social change (recently published in a book about open source/open development edited by Sherrie Bolin, as well as published in the Consortium Standards Bulletin).
“A Lever Long Enough: Value driven enterprise in the networked information economy”
Sadly, the concerns you present are indicative of society as a whole.
As with anything else, it takes time and effort to sort the wheat from the chaff – particularly with sensational headlines and sound bytes vying for our attention around every corner. And, much like Barbara Bush, there are far too many people out there who simply aren’t interested in soiling their “beautiful minds”.
While those around me have no interest in strategic discussion of national and world affairs, I have no interest in discussing their latest achievements in scrapbooking. (I have nothing against scrapbooking – I just prefer to focus my energy on other matters.) Because of that, I’ve taken the time to sort through the vast universe of the Internet to locate quality sites, along with quality contributors who challenge my thought process. You happen to represent a prime example of the payoff I’ve received for taking that time and effort.
Specifically, (as referenced in your comments) had it not been for DKos, I wouldn’t have been introduced to your deeply moving writing – particularly the diary you wrote (in early January?) with the picture of the Iraqi child whose family had been gunned down by soldiers. Your writing impacted me in such a way that I took the time to visit your personal site. And, IIRC, several weeks later another diarist at DKos covered that same topic as “Breaking News”, so it received more attention than your original writing. I guess that’s just the nature of the beast.
On the one hand, yes – I may spend too much time on the Internet when I could be engaged in civic activities. On the other hand – had it not been for those same sites I spend the time on, I’d be unaware of many critical issues I’ve since been actively engaged in. (Because I’m not going to learn about those issues of importance through the RWCM)
What you are talking about is more my speed and area of interest as well. I think with this site as new as it is, and with the quality of the writing and commenting that is already on here, that it might be possible to form sort of ‘conversational zones’ within diaries. Or, make the diaries about conversations themselves, if I am explaining that properly.
It will be easier now while diaries stay on the page for a longer time, to hold in depth conversations and strategies on specific issues, over the course of a few days. It will be more difficult once things start moving faster and diaries slip off the page, but possibly there will be a way to make ongoing discussions a category of some sort. Or something like that.
Anyway, begin as you mean to go on and all that… why not, if you have an issue for strategy or in depth discussion just label the diary as that (in addition to the title), and let people know within the diary what you are looking for. See how that works, maybe it’ll catch on and thus when new people come, that or something similar will already be an established thing.
If we all dedicate ourselves to quality postings and not gaming nothing, we can attract and retain people who value that (and turn off those looking for more of a rush). Perhaps that will go a long way towards providing more quality. Also, the site itself can be designed for specifc outcomes. Seems like booman is going to do what can be done…I am curious to see how it goes. Worst care, we cherry pick and make it our own worthwhile place.
How can I help?