26 Comments

1. AlanC:

Roger,

Have you sent this to Mr Dvorkin? It seems to me that this is exactly the kind of feedback he needs to hear.

Sep 29, 2004 - 9:42 am 2. Otter:

First, the consequences are the same for bloggers as they are for the media — loss of audience, loss of respect and influence, possibly loss of advertisers. It’s not like reporters and editors get sent to jail or lose their licenses for botching a story.

Second, unless you’re Jeff Jarvis’ friends going to conferences to assure each other that newspapers and television are going to be replaced by bloggers posting at work, the whole comparison is silly anyway. Perhaps NPR should aspire to do a better job than a bunch of amateurs?

Sep 29, 2004 - 9:47 am 3. Roger:

Yes, AlanC, I did. I will let you know what, if anything, I hear.

Sep 29, 2004 - 9:55 am 4. David Thomson:

The irony is that a vastly superior check and balance system exists in the blog world. We cannot hide our mistakes. Our successful predications—and our failures can often be readily Googled. Awhile back someone rightfully took me to task for my earlier optimism concerning Iran. Hey, they were right. I had mistakenly underestimated the power of the Mullahs.

One is compelled to think twice before posting comments. We are very well aware that they may someday come back to haunt us. And if you are wrong too often—people will legitimately ignore you. The blog world is truly a meritocracy. You have to earn everything you get.

Sep 29, 2004 - 9:56 am 5. RogerA:

David Thomson: I would not worry about making wrong predictions when speculating about such things as foreign policy or events. Those predictions foster discussion and air assumptions. The only time I expect “correct” is when someone is reporting “facts.” Now, I on the other hand, havent had a wrong prediction since 1947.

Sep 29, 2004 - 10:24 am 6. Knucklehead:

NPR listeners have always been quick to point out our errors and lapses, and in a non-partisan way. The blogs are different because many are explicitly political. It will be interesting to see if the “blogosphere” still has as much impact on mainstream journalism once the election is over.

Since I don’t listen to NPR I can’t say whether NPR listeners quickly point out errors and lapses in non-partisan ways. And I’ll have to assume that Mr. Dvorkin is implying that NPR then makes corrections or revises proceedures in response to its listeners – otherwise who cares what errors or lapses are pointed out since they are “heard” only by NPR.

It will be interesting to see how the blogosphere adjusts and adapts post-election. While I, to my chagrin, didn’t have the opportunity to participate in Roger’s health care discussion I suspect there will be a great deal more substantive discussion of complex and difficult issues and we will all learn from one another. Perhaps the rudiments of reasonable public policies will be formed.

The impact of this, should it happen, on mainstream media will be that it will need to evolve and give us similar substantive discussion or it will continue to lose audience as people slowly but surely realize that there is much more to be gained from blogs, particularly ones such as Roger’s, where civilized discourse can take place.

It is this knucklehead’s fervent hope that the blogosphere ultimately resurrects civil discussion as a respected activity and causes people to become personally involved and invested in public issues. As it is now (or was until recently), we were all stuck listening to what the MSM told us, filtered that through our experience and expertise, and went off to vote. That isn’t enough. We need to freakin’ listen to the expertise and thought process of other people when it comes to important issues. That doesn’t mean we need to embrace their ideas or claims, but we have to acknowledge, offer such respect as they deserve, and attempt to persuade one another.

Third, while the bloggers will make life uncomfortable for the media, ultimately, it is a sign of a healthy democratic give-and take. A question for the bloggers is, “what are your standards? How can the rest of us know that your sources are reliable?”

Roger and David T, above, answered this quite well. But it needs to be thrown back into Mr. Dvorkin’s face. Given what we’ve seen from CBS and Memogate and now the stupidly concieved Draftgate idiocy, what are the MSM’s standards and how can we know their sources are reliable? We don’t – we have to check for ourselves. Blogs help us do that. Partisanship is irrelevant if there is a feedback loop to check accuracy and validity and argue the points and counterpoints.

Making the rich and powerful squirm is a short-lived measure of journalistic success — both for the mainstream media and presumably, for the blogs.

I don’t see why “making the rich and powerful squirm” should be either a goal or source of pleasure. Helping we peons figure out what is in our best interests seems a better goal. If the rich and powerful wind up squirming that may yield some mild amusement or perverse pleasure but that is a side-effect.

Hammering on Dan Rather and CBS isn’t about making the rich and powerful squirm, it’s about exposing their shoddy unprofessionalism, disgusting partisanship, and unadulterated arrogance. It’s about breaking their monopoly on what is presented to the public as news or newsworthy and beating the bigotry out of them. If they sit there squirming over it that’s their problem. As for us, We The People, if we can’t be rich I suspect we’ll settle for some form of being powerful.

Bloggers must be as accountable to the public as they demand the rest of us must be. That means there should be some consequence for spreading false or partial information. Any thoughts on what those consequences might be would be a useful discussion.

And herein lies the proof that Mr. Dvorkin has it bassackwards. How is the MSM accountable? Without the blogosphere Rather and CBS would not have suffered any consequences for spreading false information. It is the MSM that is unaccountable unless people raise the danged rafters and scream bloody murder. A widely read blog could not pull off such a stunt and if it reacted the way Rather and CBS did it would be hounded out of existence.

Mr. Dvorkin, and the public, don’t need to worry much about accountablility and consequences for blogs. The schwarms of readers desperate for accurate and useful information will take care of that. Mr. Dvorkin and his fellow ombudsmen need to figure out how to introduce accountability and consequences into the MSM; it is they who are part of the tired old media form that has gone so badly awry.

Sep 29, 2004 - 11:18 am 7. slarrow:

Another advantage to the blogosphere’s method of corrections is that it is public and therefore educational. Perhaps it is true that NPR receives corrections from its listeners, but how are those corrections relayed to the public? Due to the nature of the medium, the corrections are disconnected from the original story if made at all.

On a blog, though, the entire back-and-forth play (barring unposted e-mails) is public and is connected to the original story as a matter of course. Consequently, I can stumble into one element of the Rathergate story and follow the history and development from start to finish (provided I have the time.) In addition, since the various pieces of a multi-blog story are owned by individuals, it’s virtually impossible to make a bad experience just go away.

It’s the nature of the medium. You just can’t hyperlink on radio or Google a TV broadcast with a remote control. So in this vein the blogosphere is far superior to traditional outlets in both catching errors and educating its audience.

Sep 29, 2004 - 12:01 pm 8. Frederick:

Some thoughts.

1. It is becoming increasingly clear that the blogosphere really is a revolution. The reaction of the MSM shows just how little it understands what it is seeing, beyond recognizing that it is confronted by something terrifying. Two of the many limits the MSM has in trying to understand are 1) its parochial unawareness of the extent to which its product is now almost entirely a repetition of banal cliches illustrated by new examples, and 2) its desperate reliance on the importance of degrees, credentials and prestige, a knowledge of professional journalists’ habits, methods and prejudices, and access to certain social circles.

2. An understanding of a revolutionary phenomenon certainly is beyond the capacity of the MSM, which is not populated by especially well-educated or imaginative people. The only paradigm the MSM has for the blogosphere revolution is based on a self-referential analogy, that the blogosphere consists of poseur journalists, who lack professional training, are unaware of journalistic ethics, lack access to the detective resources and information sources of journalists, can be manipulated by professional propagandists like those the MSM people regularly have lunch with, and are potentially dangerous spreaders of misinformation like the NY Times, the Washington Post or the Alphabet Networks at their worst.

3. The blogosphere really is something new. The best paradigm I know for trying to understand something new is from complexity theory, which describes such phenomena as forms of virtual life, evolving in reaction to their environment by using certain fundamental organizational principles, and taking a shape determined by a variety of visible and invisible attractors. Someone who knows more than I do about about complexity theory may want to try to guess at the future of the blogosphere in those terms. Anyone interested in considering the blogosphere that way may want to read the best, very entertaining introduction, Michael Waldrop’s Complexity.

Sep 29, 2004 - 12:12 pm 9. Knucklehead:

Slarrow,

Another advantage to the blogosphere’s method of corrections is that it is public and therefore educational.

This is a fantastic point. I’d like to add “conversational” to “educational”. And its referrential, or can be made so. And each participant can bring expertise or (in cases such as mine) the dumb questions that sometimes ellicit clearer answers.

The better bloggers link to their sources. We can each go check the source as deeply as possible and if we aren’t satisfied go dig independently. We can, as you pointed out, follow a discussion, the point-counterpoint, the questioning for more info or various eureka moments in a discussion. We get to follow thought processes and the development of the discussion and story. And we can ask questions or pursue avenues of investigation or propose what ifs. And we can bounce speculation around and identify it as such.

Blogs are not a medium for presenting information, they are a medium for building information.

Sep 29, 2004 - 12:32 pm 10. slarrow:

Frederick:

I don’t know that the blogosphere is entirely new. In fact, to my eyes it looks like a recapitulation of the open-source movement circa 1999. That was a bunch of computer programmers who were basically building computer operating systems (the most famous of which is Linux) in a loose, quick-moving collaborative environment. It too was rapid-response, pounced on “bugs” quickly and ruthlessly, and had An Enemy (Microsoft.)

A few years later, though, Linux hasn’t taken over the desktop, Microsoft is still top dog, and there are still a number of divisions within the community (due to its “herding cats” nature.) So the grandest designs haven’t been realized. Still, the impact has been significant: other companies such as IBM use Linux as a lever against Microsoft, large companies have been forced to pay more attention to good coding and security, and small but important niches have been filled by the upstarts.

I don’t know precisely what parallels may be drawn for the blogosphere, but I wouldn’t declare victory any time soon.

Sep 29, 2004 - 12:40 pm 11. Samuel:

Roger, I’m sure NPR’s ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin might make many counter arguments like, “We receive feedback from readers via phone and, e-mail” To which I would ask, do you make them all available to the public?, He could retort, “Well in essence bloggers are like talk radio hosts, they talk to a specific narrow audience, those in the comments sections are really similar to those that phone in.” To which I would say, Callers are screened and people who post in comment sections are not, unless they are vile or profane to which they are appropriately banned.

Roger there is no parallel to Weblogs. While this is technically a “War Liberal” blog, to me it is more of a neo-con weblog, while Michael J. Totten’s site is more of a “War Liberal” blog. Following this blog leads me to believe maybe a little less then half of the posters are Bush supporting Democrats, many are moderate Republicans, some are very conservative or Republican (like John Moore and DennisThePeasant) but are way too smart and would find Lucianne.com much too boring and quite unchallenging intellectually. Some like me really are cabal like Jewish evil neo-cons that have disdain for the left, yet can drive some conservatives crazy as well.

Bottom line is that WYSIWYG with websites like this, you are unique, they don’t like it TOUGH SHIT! You are here to stay, it will only get worse for them. Inaccuracies will be challenged left or right, if they are egregious enough they will be outed, they can no longer hide. It started with talk Radio (Rush Limbaugh), was exacerbated by Matt Drudge(Internet), Foxnews and is now being totally eviscerated by Weblogs. The MSM needs to show some class and deal with it graciously. It doesn’t matter the fact that a blog may slant to the right or left, what matters is accountability. Kos has been held to account by his peers. The MSM has for the most part sought to protect themselves, that is the difference. Fortunately those days are dissappearing, and thankfully so.

Sep 29, 2004 - 12:54 pm 12. Knucklehead:

slarrow,

Once upon a time, before there was an internet, some of us old-timers used usenet (IIRC, it might have had a different name, the memory fades) interest groups to accomplish something similar. It worked extremely well for technical discussions. Of course it lacked the linking capability and the much more sophisticated presentation capabilities of HTML, but it was effective in its primitive little way. One asked or answered questions according to one’s need.

It was very marxist – from each according to ability to each according to need – except that participation was at least semi-voluntary or, perhaps, only semi-coerced and valuable to both giver and taker. Interestingly enough it was also subject to flamewars and the community had to be self-policing.

Sep 29, 2004 - 12:59 pm 13. Katherine:

ìThe MSM needs to show some class and deal with it graciously.î

Samuel, this is like expecting Teresa to behave with class. Maybe in a parallel Universe.

Sep 29, 2004 - 1:14 pm 14. RogerA:

slarrow: I liked your analogy about the creative community that developed linux–there are many parallels as I think about it now.

Knuck: usenet is still around but as you point out fairly primitive by today’s standards. Listservs were very popular as well as they are today–tended to provide a forum for people with a common interest.

These examples underscore for me the rate of change of technology (someone yesterday made that point) and the ensuing democratization of knowledge. We do live in interesting times and it speaks volumes that the MSM does not understand that–and more significantly appear to be projecting their own biases and failures on the blogosphere. I personally no longer watch network news, read print newspapers other than my local county paper, or read “news” magazines. I rely on numerous blogs and feel I am better informed than I was years ago.

Sep 29, 2004 - 1:39 pm 15. Ron Hardin:

Bloggers must be as accountable to the public as they demand the rest of us must be. That means there should be some consequence for spreading false or partial information. Any thoughts on what those consequences might be would be a useful discussion.

Suddenly new voice is heard that was not heard before. That’s how accountability works. It isn’t anything new.

As long as new voices are not suppressed, accountability is working. You make your case, and it’s rejected or accepted; and if you don’t agree with this result, you can restate it. A committee isn’t needed. It’s like life.

Sep 29, 2004 - 3:29 pm 16. Catherine:

Bloggers must be as accountable to the public as they demand the rest of us must be. That means there should be some consequence for spreading false or partial information

Agreed!

The appropriate consequence for lying bloggers should be the same consequence that befalls lying newspapers: a Letter to the Editor.

No more than 500 words, please.

Sep 29, 2004 - 4:15 pm 17. Catherine:

Knucklehead

It is this knucklehead’s fervent hope that the blogosphere ultimately resurrects civil discussion as a respected activity and causes people to become personally involved and invested in public issues. As it is now (or was until recently), we were all stuck listening to what the MSM told us, filtered that through our experience and expertise, and went off to vote. That isn’t enough. We need to freakin’ listen to the expertise and thought process of other people when it comes to important issues. That doesn’t mean we need to embrace their ideas or claims, but we have to acknowledge, offer such respect as they deserve, and attempt to persuade one another

I say we all tattoo this on our foreheads right away.

I don’t know that I’m optimistic the internet will provide this . . . though OTOH, Roger’s blog actually does provide a forum for civil discussion, agreement, & disagreement, so don’t listen to me.

Blogs are not a medium for presenting information, they are a medium for building information.

I love that.

Of course, blogs are also a medium for ranting—what’s the Leon Whisteltier (sp?) line? The “deranging influence of blogs”?

Something like that.

Certainly since 9-11 I’ve felt the need for an informed conversation about what the hell is going on out there. Blogs are the closest I’ve come to having that.

When I say “informed” I mean informed: as an agent of mine once said, ‘Opinions are like a*******. Everyone has them, and all of them smell.’

I’m sorry.

That’s what she said.

I certainly appreciate good logic, so I’m interested in well-reasoned opinion. I also appreciate the “church-like” nature of blogs: the daily reinforcement of one’s beliefs and values. (That’s the good side of an ‘echo chamber.’)

But I’m also looking for well-reasoned opinion based in “open source” knowledge (articles & books other commenters have read that I haven’t) or in genuine expertise. I find that all the time around here.

Sep 29, 2004 - 4:31 pm 18. Knucklehead:

My nominee for best blog quote I saw today, from The Kerry Spot…

HEY, WILL SOMEONE SHOW NPR HOW TO USE OPENSECRETS.ORG?

Sep 29, 2004 - 4:32 pm 19. Knucklehead:

Catherine,

Thanks for the kind words. Coming from Roger’s Place’s Resident Force of Nature they are a high compliment indeed.

Maybe after the election we can start a civil discussion about how to repair the godawful public education system. I know that topic doesn’t interest you much

Sep 29, 2004 - 4:36 pm 20. Catherine:

Frederick & Slarrow

Complexity theory is one way to think about the blog phenomenon . . .

Another, for me, is more along Slarrow’s lines, I think.

I’m trying to figure out if I can make this succinct.

Hmm.

I think it’s possible the blog phenomenon will speed up cultural evolution and/or make people smarter.

I’ll start with intelligence.

What we think of as intelligence is directly & causally related to working memory.

Working memory is essentially consciousness: it’s what we’re holding in mind right this minute.

If you’re dialing a phone number, working memory holds the 7 digits in consciousness.

If you’re reading this post, working memory holds the beginning of the post in consciousness; working memory also holds the beginning of each sentence in consciousness so when you get to the period at the end the whole thing makes sense. (Let’s hope.)

The more “stuff” you can hold in working memory at one time, the smarter you are. That’s fairly well documented.

Working memory is related to the blogosphere because I think the internet may act as a kind of “hive mind,” like the “terror market” DARPA wanted to set up.

Here’s a terrific passage from one of the many articles on Rathergate:

In the same way the market sifts and analyzes information stocks far better than any individual investor or institution ever could, the blogosphere weeds out the chaff and develops and hones analysis and facts at, well, Internet speed.

“It’s sort of an open-source intelligence gathering network that draws on the expertise from around the world,” said LGF’s Johnson.

If you think of the blogosphere–or more accurately, blogospheres–as a hive mind, one of its most remarkable features is a whopping big working memory.

That makes the hive mind smart, which I’m guessing translates to making the individual minds subsumed by the hive mind smarter, too.

Next: cultural evolution.

Cultural evolution depends on the ratchet effect, meaning that cultures hold a certain level of development in place while preparing to make another “turn” forward.

In other words: each generation builds on the works of the previous generation. No generation has to reinvent the wheel.

Education is critical to cultural evolution, because education allows each new generation to master the knowledge built up by the preceding thousands of generations.

Cultural evolution probably also depends on mass education, because the more people you have to remember, use, and teach each generation’s accumulated store of knowledge, the better. If too many people fall out of the system, you have knowledge “slippage.”

Lost knowledge has to be reinvented, and that takes time. The culture isn’t evolving while lost knowledge is being replaced.

An aside: women seem to be particularly keen on transmitting one generation’s knowledge to the next. Elementary school teachers are almost universally women, and I don’t think that’s just because the pay is lower than what you’d earn as a lawyer & you get the summers off (I could be wrong . . . )

Women just naturally think children exist to learn stuff.

Which they do.

It has crossed my mind that one explanation for why Arab cultures seem to have stopped evolving is that they’ve taken their women out of the cultural ratcheting business.

If you exclude one-half of your population from the ratchet activities of learning and teaching, and if that one-half happens to be the one-half most interested in actually doing the teaching—–what’s going to be the effect?

I’m guessing that if you ran that one on a computer simulation you’d get Saudi Arabia.

I’m also guessing that the various blogospheres, with their infinite collective memories (in the form of Google & Lexis-Nexis if nothing else) may fantastically lower the amount of knowledge “slippage” between generations.

The blogosphere may be a fantastically powerful ratchet.

Sep 29, 2004 - 5:09 pm 21. Catherine:

Knucklehead

Maybe after the election we can start a civil discussion about how to repair the godawful public education system

I have some fabulous quotes for you from THE PUBLIC INTEREST’S new article on NCLB!

Will get them typed up SOON——

Sep 29, 2004 - 5:13 pm 22. Catherine:

Frederick

I’m sure “cultural ratcheting” and “hive mind working memory” relate to complexity theory somehow . . . but I can’t put my finger on it.

The words “emergent property” spring to mind, however.

Sep 29, 2004 - 5:14 pm 23. Catherine:

everyone

To the extent that the blogospheres function as hive minds, it makes sense to me that the MSM is going to take awhile to figure them out.

I don’t think I’m misstating when I say that most liberals continue to see the “market” as a dangerous & often bad thing (just today a friend here in town told me ‘Wall Street is evil.’ I’m quoting.)

The notion of the hive mind is a simple translation of the notion of the market.

Sep 29, 2004 - 5:18 pm 24. Roger:

“I don’t think I’m misstating when I say that most liberals continue to see the “market” as a dangerous & often bad thing (just today a friend here in town told me ‘Wall Street is evil.’ I’m quoting.)”

What you write, Catherine, is Conventional Wisdom, but I’m not sure it’s right. From my perspective, many “liberals” are mega-capitalists in reality from Robert Rubin to Rob Reiner (to be alliterative). The ‘Wall Street is evil’ business is no more than a pose. And that’s a problem, because these people are allowing their fantasy selves to dictate their reality. More about that in my forthcoming book.

Sep 29, 2004 - 6:02 pm 25. Neo:

“A question for the bloggers is, ‘what are your standards? How can the rest of us know that your sources are reliable?’”

The real answer comes down to the postings on the “better” sites. Most of the “better” sites annotate with hype-links ad nauseam, so that the readers has the opportunity to view the underlining arguments, thesises and hypothesises. This is something that the “dead tree” newspapers, television and radio can’t compete with except on the same terms on virtually the same media, the Internet.

Obviously, when you sift out the “better” and “fair” weblogs, you are left with the Internet chat rooms: sleazy and unreliable. This is the blight of the Internet. Just as most newspapers turn a blind eye to the tabloids with their stories of space aliens and breast implants, the weblogs try to ignore this blight.

Everyone is always interested in “public discourse” and weblogs are the current manifestation. Fear of the unknown is nothing new; especially when one’s livelihood is involved.

Just ask Dan.

Sep 29, 2004 - 9:17 pm 26. Michael B:

re, “Wall Street is Evil”

Of course it’s no coincidence that the 9/11 jihadists and many on the Left (and not only the highly radicalized Left) essentially say much the same thing under this topos of anti-Western, anti-capitalist demonologies. To state the obvious, WTC ‘93, then 9/11: both times targeting the same symbol of Western/U.S. financial strength and success. I’m all in favor of thoughtfully trenchant critiques of the excesses that formations of capital can, in the wrong hands, result in. But trenchant, illuminating critiques are of a different type and kind, a different quality and category altogether, than demonologies shared by jihadists and the Left.

Sep 30, 2004 - 8:29 am

Write a Comment

Name:	(required, displayed)
Email:	(required, not publicized)
URL:	(optional, displayed)
Comments: