In his recent
article in Salon, David Weinberger responds to suggestions that the
blogosphere is an echo chamber: Cliques of like minds parroting each
other and nodding virtually, cementing their unenlightened perpectives
and ignoring different points of view. David makes two important points:
A conversation is a social
group, and social groups serve many social functions. Some are debating
groups. Some are places for people to show how clever they are. Some
aim at political change. Very few aim at changing minds about the
founding agreement, if only because it's so hard to pull up the planks
of conversation as we walk on them. The comment blog of a presidential
candidate is not about changing minds, any more than is the Red Sox
rooting section. It's about forming a political movement. It binds
supporters socially. It keeps their enthusiasm up. It lets them
collectively work out interpretations and feelings within a group of
people they trust precisely because of their shared agreement. Likewise
for the right-wing sites. Likewise even for extraterrestrial-conspiracy
mailing lists.
If you want to see a real echo chamber, open up your daily newspaper or
turn on your TV. There you'll find a narrow, self-reinforcing set of
views. The fact that these media explicitly present themselves as a
forum for objective truth, open to all ideas, makes them far more
pernicious than some site designed to let people examine the 8,000 ways
Hillary is a bitch or to let fans rage about how much better Spike was
on "Buffy" than he'll ever be on "Angel." And if you want to see the
apotheosis of the echo chamber -- the echo echoing itself so perfectly
that it comes perilously close to achieving the 60-cycle om of the
empty mind -- consider a president who, rather than read the newspaper,
is happy to have his aides pick and choose what headlines he learns
more about, because he believes them to be "objective."
The very fact that David needs to make these points is surprising.
Sometimes we get so caught up in conversations that we don't realize
what they are, why we need them, and why we engage in them so
passionately.
I've recently been engaged in conversations about important ideas in
five different media:
 Last evening I had dinner with the delightful
Rob Paterson, and we gabbed on for the better part of three hours about
a myriad of different topics near and dear to our hearts. I had never
met Rob before in person, but I already knew him as a friend from
reading his blog and our written exchanges.
 I just got off a Skype VoIP conversation with
Matt Mower, advocate of
Purple Cows and co-inventor of an RSS aggregator called k-collector
that presents an interesting alternative to regular aggregators in the
way in which it arrays information: With it, you can view your feeds,
consisting of blogs, newsfeeds, e-mails and other RSS-subscribable
sources, by person (who), by subject (what), by date (when), or by
location of source (where).
- On my blog and on others', I read and respond to comments,
and sometimes even write posts that are conversations
in my own mind. Specifically in the last two days I have discovered
two wonderful new blogs, Northern Polemics by Kevin G, who in his
'About" page lists 'Things I Believe", and Dirtgrain, by teacher Jan Eggers, whose poetry,
like Kevin's 'About' page, serves as a very personal introduction and
an icebreaker for conversation. I became aware of both of these
gentlemen from their comments to my posts, but our conversations have
already migrated in part to e-mail.
- I have recently joined several new discussion groups, both
business-related and environmental.
Face-to-face, telephony, chat, e-mail, weblogs. As the chart above
(from my post last summer) shows, each has its place. I met Rob in
person because he was in town, conversed with Matt by VoIP telephony
because he had a lot of things he wanted to bat around, migrated from
blog comments to e-mail with Kevin and Jan because I wanted to ask them
something privately, and because a long two-way thread on a blog
appears exclusive and unseemly. I generally repond to comments to my
own blog to either thank someone for new information, or to clarify
something in my article. I comment to others, similarly, to offer
additional information or to ask for clarification. I believe comments
are inappropriate and fruitless vehicles for heated debate. I'd make a
terrible troll.
My contributions to all the discussion groups I joined were largely
ignored. I don't know if that's because I articulated my points
poorly, or made points that others in the group did not deem worthy of
discussion, or because I violated some unwritten discussion group
protocol by not introducing myself properly as a newbie, or, as a
newbie, had the gall to introduce new subjects for discussion instead
of confining myself for awhile to responses to the regular members. In
a way I felt (and perhaps others did too) that I was barging into the
middle of someone else's conversation. As a newbie in those 'rooms', no
one knew the context for what
I was saying. I was a stranger, and might as well have been talking in
a foreign language. And also, although in my chart above I identify
chat spaces as appropriate for back-and-forth discussion, the
convoluted threads within threads seem to me a most awkward way of
accomplishing this. Perhaps I'm too old to understand the flow and
etiquette of this medium, but I kept breaking the rules by sending
private e-mails instead of posts to the whole group (all of which,
unlike my posts to the group, actually did elicit a useful response). More
than once I looked for IM or Skype numbers for members because I found
the discussion group technology so limiting. As a discussion group
member, I'm a failure.
It seems to me the reasons we converse are complex and varied, and the
fact that we choose to converse mostly with like minds is that it's
easier and more personally productive than conversing with people whose
worldview is antithetical to ours. Most people change their minds
because new information undermines the logic that had led to their
former opinion, not because someone with an opposing view effectively
challenges their logic. That is why the small clique of multinationals
that now dominate the non-print mainstream media are so dangerous: It's not what they say and report that
narrows our perspectives and oversimplifies our worldviews, it's what they choose not to report.
The fact that there is almost no news about what in happening in the
third world outside the Mideast, and no news about the environment, or
about the loss of civil liberties or the outrage of gerrymandering or a
thousand other important subjects is that the mainstream media, with a
competitive eye on each other to make sure no one does anything
different or disruptive to get out of step and require a costly and
competitive response, deems all these 'complicated' and
'slowly-developing' issues unnewsworthy.
Their groupthink directly produces ours. Read Jay Rosen's brilliant
article on 'Master
Narratives' for more on this.
So why do we converse, using any of the tools in the chart? Let's start
from the writer's
perspective, or the perspective of the initiator of the conversation.
They're trying to do some of these things:
Organize and save our thoughts
and information and stories.
Improve our language skills.
Think out loud to reach a conclusion.
Find people with similar ideas, interests or ambitions.
Sell ourselves, our ideas, our writing.
Help others.
Get help.
Overcome boredom, loneliness, shyness, low self-esteem.
Debate.
Entertain.
Learn something.
Express ourselves.
From the reader's
perspective, or that of the respondent
to the communication, they're trying to do some of these things:
Learn something.
Understand something better.
Be entertained, excited, incited.
Find something interesting to talk about with others.
Find useful information and tools.
Find people with similar ideas, interests or ambitions.
Get different perspectives.
Help answer deep, personal questions.
Be seduced.
Escape.
Overcome boredom, loneliness, shyness, low self-esteem.
Conversations allow these two perspectives to blur, so that all
participants can achieve any of the objectives from either of the above
lists. And because they're iterative, they allow us to at least begin
to understand our own, and the other person's, worldview and mindset,
the context for what they are
saying, and get past the blind spots and jargon and unstated
assumptions and connotations, to reach, at last, common ground.
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