Cultural impact of the blogosphere

[bascule]

I'm trying to develop some ideas which will wind up in my podcast, so I thought I'd bounce them off the forums here and see what people thought. These ideas are going to be a bit too complex for my podcast's target audience and I'm trying to think of ways to simplify them. I'm sure it's going to take a few successive rewrites in order for that to happen. My apologies to all you blog and Podcast haters out there, but hopefully this explanation will help elucidate you as to why they are important, which is something the mainstream media has horribly failed to describe with any degree of clarity. Anyway, let's begin...

 

The bottom up model describes the process of amateur content syndication by anyone. This has occured so far in the form of blogs, which syndicate words, podcasts, which syndicate speech, and vidcasts, which syndicate video. When the claim is made that blogs have been around forever but weren't really noticed until the term "blog" was coined, what is being overlooked is the fundamental syndication technology which lets anyone tap into a little bit of your stream of consciousness and receive regular installments of your ideas, quickly and easily.

 

This model fills a gap in the information distribution process which sits between traditional word-of-mouth and the traditional top-down model employing a large scale, expensive distribution process controlled by a media outlet. By filling this gap the bottom up model fixes a number of problems which exist in both the word-of-mouth distribution model and the top down model.

 

When information is passed via word of mouth, its quality degrades quickly. What you end up receiving is a series of successive interpretations by various people. You risk people embellishing information, adding irrelevant or false information, or mistaking what they heard, among other things.

 

The bottom up model fixes this problem in several ways. First, blogs can leverage word-of-mouth spread of information to gain popularity, but rather than someone who wants to spread the blog's information having to communicate everything directly, they can simply point you at the blog and you get the same copy of the information that the original person read.

 

The bottom up model can facilitate a word-of-mouth like analysis of ideas, with bloggers responding to other bloggers, adding their opinions and other relevant information as they see fit. However, unlike word-of-mouth exchanges, blogs can link back to each other and to the original information they were analyzing. In this way, you can see the process of ideas evolving, as well as sifting through the opinion to find the actual facts being discussed so you can judge them yourself, rather than a thirdhand or fourthand account of them.

 

Everywhere people are having convergent ideas which they may not be aware of. How many times have you thought of something you considered novel only to discover that someone else has already thought of it. This happens all the time: people come to the same conclusions as each other independently, but unless you can get your ideas noticed no one else will be aware that you have had them. The bottom up model lets people form groups to work on problems which the media and mainstream society have not yet taken notice of.

 

The biggest problem of the top down model is fairly obvious: access. In order to mass distribute your ideas through the top down model, you have to find some way to tap into the system, and so the flow of great ideas is blocked by the additional barrier of trying to get a media outlet to notice your ideas and embrace them enough to fund packaging them for mass distribution.

 

The second problem with the top down model is the issue of oligarchian control. The top down model places the means of mass distribution of ideas in the hands of relatively few people. Since these people ultimately select what ideas they broadcast, what you end up with is a vision of the world skewed to advance the agenda of those who control the broadcast system, be they a Ted Turner or a Rupert Murdoch. The bottom up model lets anyone select any ideas they want to and package them for mass consumption. Likewise, an idea consumer via the bottom up model has the freedom to select anyone's ideas they choose.

 

The third problem with the top down model is the issue of feedback. If you have been misquoted or your opinions mischaracterized by a mainstream media outlet, your options in the past were rather limited: you could write a letter to the reporter who mischaracterized you asking them to clarify your position, you could write a letter to the editor indicating your dissatisfaction with the way the reporter interpreted your ideas, or you could turn to another media outlet and attempt to appeal to their desire to discredit their competitors and let them report on your mischaracterization by a rival.

 

The bottom up model provides a much needed instant feedback mechanism to the media. If you have been mischaracterized by the mainstream media you can now simply write about it in your blog and give the exact interpretation of your ideas you wished for the media outlet to have reported, then other bloggers can pick up on your ideas and spread the word for you. Reporters can now browse the blogosphere and see how people are reacting to their stories. Through this process they can discover factual inaccuracies in their reports because bloggers will inevitably point them out, or they can discover new and relevant information to include in a follow up article. Several news sites now feature a "Who's blogging about this article?" feature which gives you instant access to all this information, so you need not even wait for a follow up article, you can peruse the blogs and discover the factual inaccuracies or mischaracterizations for yourself.

 

However, the bottom up model is not just important because it now plays a vital role in the flow of ideas from person to person; it's most important because it mimics the behavior of consciousness itself. The leading model of consciousness among neurophysiologists, cognitive scientists, and phenomenological philosophers is called the "pandemonic model," and consists of innumerable specialists who can remove and insert ideas from a global workspace. When a specialist finds a particular idea sitting in the global workspace which they like, they can tell other specialists, or they can provide their own embellishments to the idea then their copy of the idea into the global workspace. Ergo, ideas which are good enough to be noticed by large numbers of specialists are the ones that dominate our thought process and used to take action. The bottom up model lets people collectively shape ideas which "bubble up" through the blogosphere and capture the attention of more and more people.

 

What you eventually end up with are very compelling arguments for particular courses of action, the kind which, if they were in our heads, would lead us to take a particular course of action. The way people work in groups will more and more start to mimic the way the specialists which comprise consciousness work collectively to solve larger problems. The behavior of human society will thus continue to take on more and more of the characteristics of a single conscious entity.

[ecoli]

I've read some very intellegent blogs where the blogger has had very interesting ideas. I've read some crap blogs that don't say anything. Its a good way for the voice of the common man to be heard, but some voices I wish would stay quiet.