The Wisdom of Blogs

Something I haven't done before: portal my blog.

Crossposted from Cognitive Resonance

Compared to the mainstream media, blogging is faster. Bloggers don’t have to wait for the next day’s newspaper or even the six-o-clock news bulletin. They post their thoughts whenever they occur to them. But the principal benefit of the internet, in general, and blogging, in particular, is not speed but interactivity. Television is a passive medium. It feeds pre-packaged reports to a largely docile audience. Homes in which television is dominant produce less civically-engaged citizens. Web-logs are a different form of media. They are like the town hall meetings of old but they assemble expert rather than geographical communities. The best blogs encourage comments from their readers. Some of these comments are almost inevitably unreadable but many visiting commentators understand more about the subject under discussion than any generalist TV reporter could ever know.

From The Business Online Hat tip: Instapundit

(The article also references An Army of Davids and The Wisdom of Crowds)

And what does all this have to do with anything? Right now what we have with the internet is, as Reynolds points out, an infrastructure that levels the playing field, and gives the individual the power to take on the big boys. Plus, it empowers individuals en masse to take on the corporations and organizations which are capable of simply bringing more resources to the table.

Of course, even the internet will become, if not corporatized, then at least strucutured. Specifically, infrastructured, with allegiances, alliances, and the uncoordinated but self-organizing work of diverse individuals falling into stable collectives that amplify only selected themes. Of course, that is the way of all things: distillation is the way to reification, after all.

Reynolds himself is on the forefront of this wave, being an invited member of Pajamas Media and I certainly don't begrudge the Wild West attitude of the blogososphere. And I would hate to style myself a prophet of gloom and doom. But by the same token, the web is not heaven, and free and universal access is not, in itself, a remedy against the propensity of individuals to form stable, mutually supporting structures. The Web might be a great force for education and a great repository for wisdom; and chaos might just be the best way to ensure the continued survival of the potential it liberates.

But it would be a mistake to forget that chaos inevitably organizes.