Micah Sifry has a great insight over at Iraq War Reader: Bloggers are editors, not journalists. We bloggers are not reporting what we see, we’re editing what others tell us.
Micah drives to the hole and dunks it! This is precisely the insight that’s been missing from the media vs. bloggers dialogue. Micah goes on to imply that our new collective cultural editing is the global equivalent of the blind committee examining the elephant.
Blogging, then, is the equivalent of a police sketch artist. Even if each of us is handicapped and specialized, the sketch artist makes our collective effort holistic and insightful. (Extending the metaphor to demonstrate the Sifry brothers’ plot to dominate blogspace, Technorati is the artist’s indispensable index.)
The Metaphor, PleaseOpen source mavens and groupies will quickly see the tight parallel between bloggers’ collective discernment with the open source development process, where “many eyes make all bugs shallow”:
We bloggers are more than zeitgeist gazers. I believe we’re engaged in a collective design process by which human values are beginning to supersede corporate valuelessness, correcting an unintended outcome whereby ink-by-the-barrel was affordable only to the big pubs. The values–and outrage–that inform our posts are those of ethical individuals, reacting to the tapestry of inert sensibilities woven by Big Media. Carbon-based persons hold strong beliefs, which they feel are self-evident. This is not true of charter-based persons–corporations–which, in their ceaselessly failing Turing Test, cannot bring themselves to speak in a human voice expressing human values. What are we designing? I think it’s a society with a memory. Big media’s not much interested in the historical arc describing how we got here. Part of it may be the low level of cultural awareness of most reporters and certainly of the talking heads. Amateur writers though, working literally for the love of editing out the errors so obvious to them, instantiate thoughts and point to evidence that, once documented, is harder to ignore than yesterday’s newsprint recycled as today’s fish wrap. Consideration of prior art was once a requirement for serious commentary, where each work presuming to be consequential felt considered the thread that preceded it. Arbitrary, ungrounded declarations were dismissed as a form of daydreaming, not as serious work. This requirement lives on in science and, happily, in computer programming and the welcome tyranny of standards-based engineering. Prior art has been abandoned by marketers huckstering old wine in new bottles and describing the trivial as startling. When news became marketing, those tricks were adopted. When marketing took over politics, appearances trumped statecraft. Can We Go Home Again?If we’re lucky, attribution-based blogging will lead our cultural dialogue back to the reflective candor that was natural when everyone in the clan or village witnessed the same truths and were constrained by their shared history. |