Tag: Internet Philosophy (Page 37 of 39)

My girlfriend suspects I am having an affair.
She thinks this, because she often walks in when I am typing messages to someone called Sunny. While this mysterious character will no doubt be flattered by the implication, its not him I’m obsessed with, just his RSS feed. His, and those belonging to about thirty other people too.
When I mentioned in August that I would be inaugurating a blog (or a “blog” as I would have called it then), my girlfriend was slightly offended. Why communicate online when there is a whole city of real people to talk to? Why sacrifice human contact, and body language, to have a debate with someone you will never meet, never see, never know? My response was to reassure her that I was not seeking to replace proper conversations. I pointed out that we gravitate towards people with similar opinions and outlook, and it would be a tragedy if there were friends of mine I hadn’t met yet. Through the Internet I could find them, even if by some ridiculous mistake of fortune they happened to live in Nebraska. Using my website to broadcast my thoughts into the ether, I too would be famous for fifteen people.
The stigma associated with meeting people online (for debate, love, or friendship) reduces every day, but I don’t believe the Internet presents a threat to offline, non-virtual (i.e. real) interaction. Over at The Triforce, where the authors are famous for fifty people apparently, Ste Curran tells us why Internet communities are better in the flesh:

Meeting someone online is a bit like telling a ghost story. It is meant to be real, but all parties involved should know it is also essentially fictional. Everything you read on a forum, in an IM, in an email; each of these fragmented bursts of data, or microscopic-essays, or simple streams of consciousness; each of them is a representation of a single instant in someone’s life. The person producing them is communicating by sending a series of snapshots of themselves, and stringing together those snapshots misses out a big piece of what makes them them.
…
So the signature, the avatar, the email address you hold up as this person is not quite the same as firstname lastname behind the keyboard. It’s not they’re picking themselves out as something else with objective cynicism … The person you’re typing to is the tone of their voice, the way their eyes dart, the way their clothes fall, that fractional gasp when they’re surprised. It is in everything they don’t know about themselves.
Again, because that is super important: they are not hiding. Anything but. Something about the internet means people are more free with their conversation there than they might be if they’d known you for months in real life. They are telling you things in private they haven’t told their best friends. Even forums where you talk about nothing bring you so close. Read between the lines in the nonsense and you can build up incredibly detailed internal profiles of your online friends. You’ll still never really know them until the moment you touch.

To be honest, I’m rather wary of quoting a whole three paragraphs of Triforce material. Since I have met them online and in person, I can tell you with authority that fuelling their egos further is probably not a good idea. So no-one tell them, OK?

Nosemonkey provides a long and interesting peice on the cliques and changes abound in blog network.

This is the main concern. If we all start meeting up in the real world and communicating via email rather than just comment boxes etc, is this likely to turn us all into some kind of nepotistic clique in just as bad a way as the mainstream press (pretty much) is? This whole obsession with ID cards, 90 Days etc is a prime case in point – in some areas it’s already almost turning into a Britblog hive mind…

The ‘hive mind’ idea is a popular one in science fiction, which in turn reminds me of the SETI screen-saver, where your computer analyses radio noise from the heavens in its spare time, looking for a pattern. The idea of a blog-hive-mind is like this too: Many people analysing lots of information. As Nosemonkey points out, the sheer volume of information being churned out by the established and online media means that we cannot read it all, and we cannot verify all of what we read. But the ‘blogosphere’ means we don’t have to. Between us all, we read everything, and between us we recommend the best of what we have read. The most interesting and controversial articles, or those that somehow capture the zeitgeist of the hour, will succeed in the market-place of ideas.
And the marketplace is not a bad comparision either. Why not concieve of the internet as a giant public square, where the best price can be obtained for your goods, you are sold exactly what you want, avoid tedious discussions, and spend more time finding precisely the right people to be friends with, and to argue with?
Update: From the comments section of the same article, I found a great piece on Weblogs, Powerlaws, and Inequality. Apparently it is highly unlikely that blog posts will success in the marketplace of ideas after all! As another commenter puts it: Shall we just forget about it all and get on with writing about things that interest us?

Many sites out there have rightly mentioned Tim Worstall’s 2005: Blogged, especially those who have had one of their articles included in the anthology. I notice Chris at qwghlm is pleased to be included for his article on ID Cards, as are the folk at Pickled Politics regarding the fantastic Apu essay.
I wonder if the book may provoke some kind of Heisenberg effect? By this, I mean – what if the very act of observing something, changes that thing you are observing? Now 2005: Blogged has been published, eager bloggers will begin beavering away, planning seminal posts that will make it into 2006: Blogged. Some kind of annual blogging awards may be just around the corner too! All of this will change the way people write. No longer will they fire off an angry yet unwittingly eloquent rant at 4am, instead they will be working and re-working their articles in the hope of winning an inclusion. I know I will.

As Open Source Media launches as a huge aggregate of blogs, bloggers and journalists, and Tim Worstall’s book hits the shelves, the blogosphere is itself under the spotlight again. We are always told that the media likes nothing better than a story about itself. Perhaps the debates about the future and nature of blogging are a signal of a growing maturity of the medium.
In a three line post, Cynical Bastard suggests that one day the blog bubble might burst. I wonder what he means by that?
When the dot-com bubble apparently burst, it wasn’t the concept of web-pages that was discredited, or the concept of having a company web-page… or even the concept of doing business on-line. It was merely the idea that money could be made faster and easier online, without the constraints that business traditionally had to deal with. When it became apparent that the same rules of business applied to online services as to the other industries, people stopped over-inflating the value of these companies, and investments were made in a less frivolous manner.
Despite protests to the contrary, blogs can survive without huge financial resources. While many blogs have the ambition to be hugely influential nodes in the network, I suggest that part of the point of blogging is actually being one very small link in that chain. That there are so many bloggers out there can be a strength, not a weakness, because (just like the internet in itself) there is no central point that can be targeted, no bubble to burst and disrupt the system. To continue the analogy: the blogoshere is not a bubble – its a gigantic pile of foam, rising high over the bath-tub.
What might not be sustainable are the larger blog sites. If their size and influence grows, so they become more like the traditional media. The key bloggers (and their researchers) need a salary, and get some office space to manage the expansion, which costs money, which means adverts, marketing campaigns, subscription-only content and copy deadlines. There’s nothing wrong with any of this per se, but the difference between the pigs and the humans will become harder to discern. How long before we hear complaints: “Open Source Media didn’t publish my article, they’re control freaks!” or “Samizdata have smeared me!”. From there, it is a short step to ‘watch’ sites set up just to fisk these blogs… at which point we ask how much of an ‘alternative’ they really are. Perhaps it was better when everyone was alone, and in pajamas.
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