The Market Value of the Blogosphere
Over at the Altantic online yesterday, Ross Douthat posted an interesting piece about the future and general webbiness of blogs. The flip side to their dazzling speed, he argues, is "that blogging is the enemy of literary craft and intellectual depth."
Arguments over tax policy and the proper interpretation of Knocked Up find a natural home in the blogosphere; attempts write a great novel or compose a paradigm-shifting philosophical treatise do not. If you want to be the next George Will or Paul Krugman, you'd be well-served to take up blogging now, because it'll make you a better pundit. If you want to be the next Ian McEwan or Philip Roth, or the next Alastair McIntyre or Richard Rorty, I'd advise you to rip your internet cable out of the wall now, before it's too late.Sullivan and Reihan agree, but in defense of their chosen medium point us to Hayekian collaboration and aggregate knowledge. For me, such market analysis of the blogosphere and, in particular, blogging communities, misses the point.
In dealing with Hayek and the internets, Cass Sunstein's Infotopia is worth a read. Pitting Habermassian deliberation vs. Hayekian market aggregation in an all out cyber-brawl, Sunstein lands squarely in the camp of Hayek. Or, to quote a review by Ethan Zuckerman:
You can think of Infotopia as a caged deathmatch between Hayek and Habermas, streamed live on the Internet. Habermas taps out somewhere around page 200.
High on Hayek, Sunstein lauds wiki and open source projects but still shakes out blogs with the same rough grip as he did in Republic.com. The trenchant and often biased voices of the US political blogosphere simply confirm his suspicion of ideological cocoons and echo chambers. But for all the market metaphors that permeate modern social analysis, Zuckerman points out that Hayek just may not be the man for the blogosphere:
Unlike Wikipedians, who are working towards the common goal of a free, fair and accurate encyclopedia, or F/OSS authors, who are working towards the common goal of a free, functioning piece of software, bloggers usually don’t have a common goal. Holding them to the standard of Hayekian aggregation of accurate information is like criticizing a football team for failing to produce a grand ballet. Yes, some writers have described football as balletic, but your average offensive tackle is trying to pancake a defensive lineman into the ground, not create high art. Your average blogger is trying to express her personal or political opinions, not further the advance of global knowledge.
But beyond the proclamation of personal opinions, such market interpretations miss the social value of political communities such as this one. Douthat may be right about the lack of paradigm-shifting treatises to emerge from the blogosphere, but limiting analysis to isolated choices that aggregate to market knowledge ignores the power such communities do have--contributing to change as a part of a larger social and intellectual movement. Organic and interconnected entities, they are far greater than an aggregate of isolated individuals.*
*It should be noted that much of the thought behind this stems from Andrew's Marie Claire inspired post and our subsequent office discussion.
Heidegger was a nazi and a philosopher. Today he might be a blogger and a philosopher. It's passion vs talent.
July 19, 2007 1:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think that's bad advice for aspiring novelists. Most of the greats were big into writing letters, which is a bit like blogging. This is just more public.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
July 19, 2007 1:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
But beyond the proclamation of personal opinions, such market interpretations miss the social value of political communities such as this one.
Bingo. And even more so, a space like Daily Kos, which to me has even more social-ness than here. (Even accounting for scale. Once Saturday Morning Garden Blogging starts up in the Cafe, then, maybe...)
I don't know enough about Hayek to comment, but Habermas, too, misses the social nature of the blogosphere. Much of what goes on has nothing to do with anything rational. Then again, the same goes for politics.
As far as the question of blogging and Writing, I'm no novelist, but I think maybe what's being missed here is that blogging often is *less* like writing, and more like, well, talking. And that's where Habermas gets it right -- this place is like a coffeehouse, where I can argue -- or listen to others argue -- the Great Issues of the day. Or, I can post a Lily Allen video from YouTube, and sing along with my peeps.
Oh, and Evann, kudos for keeping the Marie Claire Thoughts flowing.
You're making Andrew proud. :-)
"Thank God George Bush is our president." -Rudy Giuliani
July 19, 2007 1:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'd like to second that this is a great post by Evann. We gotta encourage Josh's new staff, after all. And it's easy to see that Josh is able to hire smart people despite how new a business TPM is.
I'll also second cscs on the social environment. I'm not really into Kos but I know there are readers here who I consider friends and whose posts I look out for.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
July 19, 2007 2:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
As if "paradigm shifting" analysis is some sort of desideratum in the quest for knowledge!
The notion of a Paradigm and "normal science" versus "abnormal science" and the subsequent revolutions in science that lead to paradigm shift such as those from Newtonian physics to Relativity Theory and then Quantum Mechanics, is not something that scientist look forward to as an end in itself.
It seems obvious that the write has not read Thomas Kuhn from whence this philosophical treatise originates. The book is called “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.”
Kuhn makes it clear that a paradigm shift in itself cannot be viewed as an "advancement of knowledge", but as a sort of intellectual gestalt switch by which what we e.g. once saw as an old lady is now viewed as a young woman.
So, no, the aim of intellectual activity is NOT to have as many of these gestalt switches as possible.
In the blogosphere environment it is true that we find insular communities articulating their own particular "paradigm". That's what Kuhn calls Normal Science. Paradigm shifts happen in such communities when too much anomalous data cannot be neatly fit into the paradigmatic theory. People cast about for alternative paradigms that might fit the data better. Those are revolutionary times. We do not want to be in revolutionary times in continuous perpetuity. That is not the neo-enlightenment project.
As an intellectual, I find nothing wrong with articulating existing paradigms and am not one to shout "my kingdom for a new paradigm!"
July 19, 2007 5:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
Blogging is a different form of writing from letters, however, especially letters written in times before computers, telephone, or even regular mail delivery. In those days, people writing to each other took days or weeks to compose letters, knowing they wouldn't arrive for another few weeks after the events being described, and knowing this was their only way to talk to each other if they didn't live close by.
I've seen too many people who claim they want to be novelists frittering away their energy on their blogs. When the instantaneous pleasure of dashing off something and publishing it instantly is weighed against the hours of plotting and plodding needed to write and finish a novel, the novel often comes out last.
The public nature of blogs just makes the problem worse. People who have personal blogs usually have a readership composed of their family and friends, who aren't in a position to be critical. Writers of other kinds of blogs, like political ones, can get drawn into spending lots of time monitoring their message boards. The thing can become an energy sink.
July 19, 2007 5:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Blogging forces me to write something everyday. This is how you become a better writer.
I generally avoid commenting on the issue of the day but try to say something with a bit more depth (not that I've succeeded yet, but that's the goal).
http://heterodoxeconomist.typepad.com/
July 19, 2007 5:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
The thing can become an energy sink.
Oh, but it feels so good...
July 19, 2007 6:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think that Douthat and the rest of the status quo media are suffering from a limited perception of what a blog is--off the top of my head, I came up with two of today's best writers who are also bloggers: Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing fame (one of the most trafficked websites on the internet), and Bruce Sterling of The Viridian Design Movement
Perhaps the literati still consider Science Fiction writers to be something less than 'real' writers, however, I'd like to point out that in the article, Douthat uses 'blog' as an adverb (bloggier), which says something about both his lexical skills and depth of perception of the blogging movement.
July 19, 2007 8:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't see the dichotomy there. Is literature the enemy of theatre? They serve different purposes and employ radically different formats. They do compete for readers'/viewers' attention, but neither is intrinsically "better" than the other. If anything, they are complementary. Same with blogs and novels.
Sure, writing a novel like a blog sounds dumb. So what? Analyzing and discussing the issues of the day in a novel would be even dumber.
A digression on the topic of aggregation vs. deliberation (stop reading here if you don't care about software).
For Wikipedia, aggregation works extremely well. That is because encyclopedia entries are to a large extent independent of each other. The huge manpower available thanks to the Internet can be effectively employed because the entry for "chimpanzee" is quite distant from the entry for "Coldplay" and either can exist without the other. Just as importantly, if no one feels like writing the entry for "echidna", the encyclopedia can still be highly useful without it.
Not so with software. It is not a coincidence that F/OSS software hasn't quite taken over the world, and apparently isn't going to in the foreseeable future. That's because something like an operating system is very much like a puzzle picture composed of thousands of interlocking segments. The interlocking makes the pieces highly dependent on each other, and the big picture requires one designer or a very small group of designers sharing a single design philosophy. Deliberation is crucial. On top of that, the number of people who can write good software is radically smaller than the number of people who can write good encyclopedia entries.
To give real world examples from the software arena: Apple understands the need for coherent design. Apple can take various puzzle pieces, including some from the F/OSS world, make sure that they all fit neatly and put them all together. Linux is an example of what happens when the overarching design isn't there. The puzzle pieces don't fit together without some tweaking and the big picture isn't there, everyone has to make their own. This works well when highly customized "pictures" are desired, but not when a pre-packaged general purpose OS is needed.
July 20, 2007 2:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
Apple understands the need for coherent design. Apple can take various puzzle pieces, including some from the F/OSS world, make sure that they all fit neatly and put them all together.
But even Apple is a far cry from the lone novelist, toiling away at the typewriter...
I know you qualified Apple with a "small group" of designers sharing a philosophy, and I'm not disagreeing with you. I know, though, that wikis and other social media are on the rise internally, behind corporate firewalls. Just a minor point, but I wonder to what extent blogs, wikis and other (aggregation) related software play a part in the "deliberation" development model?
"Thank God George Bush is our president." -Rudy Giuliani
July 20, 2007 4:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
I know about corporate wikis, I'm using them myself. And they are a very helpful tool, although I primarily see them as a sort of public notepad, a place where not-quite-formal yet useful information is stored. The fact that wikis are editable by many people also improves the quality of the information (as long as edit wars can be avoided - sometimes an issue on Wikipedia).
Internal blogs and discussion fora are IMO more important because they can bring everyone to the same page. Designers can explain why non-obvious decisions were made in a format accessible to many readers.
The real difficulty of software development is not lack of manpower but efficient organization. It's not a coincidence that Windows Vista was years behind schedule, even though Microsoft hardly suffers from lack of resources - in fact overabundance of resources may have been a factor contributing to the problem. Once software becomes so complex that no one quite understands it anymore, I'm not sure any amount of tools and communication aids can significantly help.
July 20, 2007 6:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
Just sounds like the agonizingly slow death throes of another traditional print media outlet to me.
July 20, 2007 6:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
Sounds mostly like a lack of subject on which to ramble.
There has been at least one novel composed entirely of emails. I see no obstacle to telling a story through blog posts. Is there some essential diffence, the lack of smell perhaps, between a journal and a blog?
We're seeing a slow-motion coup, folks. Let's show the world that blogging has not only market value but political weight. I just emailed my Senator (Durbin) that the contemptuous WH response to possible contempt charges has to be squashed, fast.
July 20, 2007 8:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
Douthat is wrong. Writers can tear out their internet connection, they can even move to a deserted island and write until their fingers bleed, but unless they're born with innate talent they're not going to produce anything other than what they produce. Writers have always had distractions and the internet is just one of many.
There will be good bloggers, great bloggers, bad bloggers and uneven bloggers, just as there are good writers and great writers in any medium where language is the means to an end. To claim that blogging will not produce any earth shaking, paradigm shifting treatises is specious - blogging itself is a paradigm shift and no one can predict that there is no writer lurking in the blogosphere now or in the future who won't produce a great online novel, blog or treatise or any kind of great writing.
Any time a new medium becomes available to a greater number of people there are those critics who claim that the new medium has diluted a greatness, (which is nebulous to begin with) and nothing but a mediocrity can result from the new medium. It is just not true.
July 20, 2007 8:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
Good observations. I don't know the answer. Do I spend too much time on TPMCafe and too little on my own creative work? Maybe. At the same time, commenting here loosens my mind up and gets the other work going. So sometimes it's a positive and other times it's negative.
At least I know that if I ever finish and sell my novel that there are people here I could tell about it who might actually read the darned thing.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
July 20, 2007 8:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
Rule number 1: those who post or comment on blogs overestimate the significance, intelligence, and impact of such things. Rule number 2: those who dump on it underestimate the potential of the medium.
In fact, at the opposite extreme, for profits and others are using the Web to develop what we in publishing call "major reference works." There's also the appeal for the rest of us, distinct from the appeal of impulsive and unedited responses, of having infinite time and space unlike journalism. It's why I started a site back in 1995, and it half embarrasses me that I'm now "just a blogger," since I draft something days or months in advance and can run 4,500 words at times. (I'm not claiming my site is the best thing since chopped liver.) But the other potential of blogs, to stir the waters and rally people, is interesting, too.
In sum, sites like this may or may not change the world or speak authoritatively, But they inform me and perhaps rally the troops. And they don't exhaust all the possiblities. Interestingly, this repeats a centuries' old debate about whether newspapers and magazines demeaned writing.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
July 20, 2007 1:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's funny to me that he specifies 'philosophical' treatises as among the things not suitable for blog development. This is ironic, because quite a few philosophers at the forefront of their field now-days have a large presence online.
In fact, no small amount of journal articles in philosophy for the last few years have begun as blog entries, been commented on by other philosophy professors who are also online, and developed from there into something suitable for a professional journal. The internet culture has spurred growth in the field of philosophy, because debates that once took months over an exchange of letters now take a week or so on a blog. It's true that the philosophy blogosphere moves slower than the political one, as writers do tend to put a great deal of thought and reference-checking into replies or comments, but the principle remains the same. I think there is a myth that one must think for months to develop a solid idea, whereas often people who know enough about a specific subject in philosophy are ready with considerably less time for a very deep discussion; the months simply came from the postage time required for the parties to the discussion to communicate. For good examples of the philosophical field forging ahead in the blogosphere, see:
Thoughts, Arguments, Rants - Brian Weatherson's (a Cornell Univ Philosophy professor) blog and a gathering place for the philosophical community online
Brain Pains - A group blog about philosophy of mind
Certain Doubts- The Baylor Univ. Philosophy Dept's blog about all things epistemological
Ethics Etc - a group of ethicists blogging together about technical subjects in ethics
July 20, 2007 1:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
Too many people claim they want to be novelists. I have a serious writing hobby. But it's not fiction or poetry. I often write in public places. Many strangers over the years say the same thing, "Is it fiction, or poetry?" There's just this perception out there that we've some serious shortage of novels and poetry, requiring heroic attempts to fill the voids. Or something.
Seriously, most people find it socially acceptable to say "I want to be a novelist." If you sit in a public place scrawling, it's acceptable if that's why, and really screws with people's perception of reality if it (or poetry) isn't. But there's plenty of good - even great - fiction and poetry in this world. It's not what we're short of.
Political and social wisdom, on the other hand, we're way short of. It's worth it to have millions of bloggers trying to evolve or create what we need. It's just not quite socially acceptable (outside the blogs, perhaps) to say, "What I'm doing is working hard at being a damn good blogger."
And you know, many people capable of perfectly good blog posts - have you read the manuscripts of their novels? More focus on those manuscripts is not going to add more glory to civilization, to say the least.
July 20, 2007 5:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Your Apple to Linux comparison is stilted. Both are in the same range of market share - with Linux more successful in servers, OS X more successful in desktops. But OS X is much closer to Linux than you might think - it's essentially BSD, which like Linux is a UNIX variation. There are many BSD distributions, just like there are many Linux distros. If you want the sort of coherent skin OS X puts on BSD, the competition is Ubuntu Linux ... behind at the moment, but barely.
But let's grant Jobs is a great industrial designer. Let's also grant that the heart of Linux - the kernel - is also in the hands of a great designer at that level - Linus. Then compare either to the real opposite of both, Windows. Despite all the "advantages" of a formal hierarchy containing some truly brilliant people, Windows isn't elegantly skinned, and isn't elegant in its internals - the worst of all possible worlds.
In fact what Windows most resembles is the horrid mess that is current main stream media. All that hierarchy, all that education, all that accumulated power and experience, and what trash their product is. But certainly it's not that they need to be more consolidated and controlled, or we'd all be thanking the gods for Murdoch.
July 20, 2007 5:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
If blogging's not working, how has the public concluded by 54% that Cheney should be impeached? There's certainly not 54% of us watching Olberman or reading Harpers. So where's the public getting this notion? It's not given any currency in the main stream media at all - unless you count the recent Bill Moyers show - which came after the fact of the public sentiment.
I submit it's entirely driven by the blogs. Not directly, since only a few million are active in them. But the blogs are conversation, and the conversation doesn't stop there. We carry our conversations on out to our family and friends and strangers in bars. The "six degrees of separation" thing works.
Marketing has long known that people are much more convinced by what they hear from other people than from anything the media can present. Blogs are the ultimate tool for refining and extending word of mouth. Blogs have far more power than anyone has yet correctly assessed.
July 20, 2007 5:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
OS X is a lot further from Linux than you think :-) Interface isn't implementation. The Apple xnu kernel emphatically isn't BSD. Yes, it has a significant BSD interface layer and there's a lot of userland BSD stuff in OS X. But the core is Mach with Apple's additions. OS X is an amalgam of Mach, BSD, NeXT, and old MacOS. OS X's driver model (IOKit) is quite distant from BSD, and one can guess the different heritages from things like object/executable file formats (Mach-O on OS X vs. ELF on most modern Unices).
I totally agree that the Linux kernel is in good hands an is being developed in a sound manner. OK, threading in 2.4 was laughable but the 2.6 kernel line is quite good. Unfortunately, Linux distros contain lots more than the kernel, and that's where the big mess starts.
Linux remains a remarkably poor platform for deploying applications. I know how difficult it is to develop "shrink-wrapped" applications for Linux. The process is horrendously complex and hence expensive when compared to developing for Windows or OS X. I don't think that's going to change anytime soon.
Windows is indeed an interesting case. Windows 9x, for years the world's workhorse OS, was so bad that it would have been laughable if it wasn't tragic. Windows NT and especially NT 5.x aka W2K/XP is a decent OS, but with the resources Microsoft has, it should have been a brilliant system, beautiful and functional. Windows tries to be all things to all people and the result is that it's not that great for anyone.
July 23, 2007 1:15 AM | Reply | Permalink