Re: [-empyre-] Re: blog wars

[Ray Davis <emprayd@kokonino.com>]

Jill Walker <jill.walker@uib.no> wrote:

> The thing about blogs is that most people will not see what they're not 
> interested in. You read bloggers that are *like you* - much as most people 
> make friends with people who are similar to them rather than with people 
> who challenge all their prejudices and have completely different life 
> priorities than they do.

Well, it depends. Given sufficient interests and energy and few enough hot 
buttons, it's possible to be exposed to quite a variety of views and 
experiences among those writers one follows. Yes, there's the first meeting 
to arrange, but that can be fairly easy and untraumatic in a link-based 
system like the web or a browsing-based system like library stacks.

That's always been my quarrel with "More Like This" systems. I don't need 
"More Like This" or "People Like Myself"; I'm already quite enough like 
myself already, thank you. I need "Different From This/Me But Interesting."

The beauty of the weblog format is that the initial encounter may be due to 
a very small overlap indeed and quickly unfold into something quite 
unexpected. If each weblog entry was a separate page, our one look might be 
it; no really surprising knowledge or discomfort would be gained. But 
because weblogs generally have many entries per page, we end up being 
exposed, not just to what we already know that we're interested in, but 
also to that which we didn't know was of interest until we'd seen it.

> I like blogs for their non-confrontationalism, or for the possibility of 
> non-confrontationalism. Flame wars are virtually non-existent in blogs - 
> or rather, in the blogs that I read.

Yes; because weblog authors control their own publication, the form 
actually discourages flame-wars. Unmoderated mailing list and discussion 
group forms encourage flame-wars by making hijacking by the pugnacious much 
more easy than maintenance of polite discourse. We, on the other hand, can 
simply ignore rude hostility.

On the minus sides: 1) Our nonflammability is part of a general cooling 
down of discussion. For those of us who think best while engaged in heated 
conversation, it's a less productive form than, say, an ideally moderated 
and populated discussion list would be. 2) Those who are less exgamous -- 
those who prefer to encounter ONLY "More Like This" and "People Like 
Myself" -- find it even easier to maintain a segregated community in 
blissfully self-congratulatory ignorance.

Witness the warbloggers' notion that they rule the web -- when, in fact, 
it's only that they're devoting all their time on the web to reading each 
other.

Best,
Ray

<http://www.bellonatimes.com/> - Bellona Times