On March 30, 2009, The Atlantic published an article titled "The Quiet Coup," written by Simon Johnson. Almost immediately, Andrew Sullivan, a blogger at The Atlantic Online posted a reader's response on his blog. As well on the same day, Dani Rodrik, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, posted his thoughts on the article. A slew of comments and other blog posts quickly followed.
I found out about Simon Johnson's article because I subscribe to Rodrik's blog and saw a bunch of related items being shared by friends who also use Google Reader. On April 2, David Brooks published his two cents in his NYTimes column. By the time Brooks came out with his op-ed piece, I had read a half dozen opinions about "The Quiet Coup," and it was pretty tough to put a substantively different spin on what had already been written by premier economists who participate in the blogosphere.
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This one a little bit closer to home. On February 2, CleanTechnica.com published a piece about how Andres Pacheco and Alex Bell, two engineering students from Swarthmore, had built a hydrogen fuel cell-powered motorcycle for their senior project. LivingtheAmericanGreen.org followed suit with a post on February 17 and a Wired.com blog covered the engineering project once again on March 3. Yesterday, the Discovery Channel's Daily Planet put out a video clip featuring interviews with Pacheco and Bell and the motorcycle crawling along Swarthmore pathways.
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So, as I spend more and more time on Google Reader, here are a couple of things that have struck me:
1) Redundancy. As can be seen from above, there is a lot of redundancy in Internet news coverage, and it becomes especially clear when using Google Reader. A friend of mine calls this "echo."
2) The line between traditional media sources (print journalism and TV production) and the Internet blogosphere definitely blurs. Traditional media moves at geriatric speed in comparison to the hordes of freelance writers out there. Note that the Discovery Channel covered the Swarthmore engineers a good two months after CleanTechnica.com caught wind of the story. The claim is that traditional media comes out on top in terms of quality and thoughtfulness, but that notion is pretty quickly challenged when you see the likes of Dani Rodrik or Timothy Burke blogging frequently.
3) What do you do with the idea of authorship? Think of a million students crammed into a single classroom and think of the voices in that classroom. Individual voices inevitably get drowned out in a general din. Who said what first? Can you tell the difference between the original and the echo? I must say: this idea of echo makes me very gun-shy when it comes to posting.
4) My time spent on Google Reader has definitely, definitely crowded out my other reading, and I don't feel good about this shift. At Swarthmore, it's common and often fashionable to complain about the insularity of the campus and how bubble-like it is. I'm beginning to view "the bubble" and "the ivory tower" differently. To constantly be at the cusp of engagement with the world through the Internet and the blogosphere...to always be reading words that are no more than a day old...I need respite from it all. To be sure, I am a neophyte in the blogging world and I feel a bit like a newborn babe when it comes to everything that is happening right at this moment. But this sense of novelty I enjoy and want to preserve. It comes from the four years I spent hidden away between library stacks and it enables me to approach all that is now critically.
I need to crawl back in bed with The Iliad, words that have rung true for centuries. Otherwise, I fear I will be swept away in the sea of voices, lost forever.
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3 comments:
sure you are overwhlemed by the enormous amount of information out there.
one of the chinese philosopher 莊子- Zhuangzi said this:
吾生也有涯，而知也無涯。 以有涯随无涯，殆已；已而为知者，殆而已矣。以有涯隨無涯，殆已；已而為知者，殆而已矣。
There is a limit to our life, but to knowledge there is no limit. With what is limited to pursue after what is unlimited is a perilous thing; and when, knowing this, we still seek the increase of our knowledge, the peril cannot be averted.
here is the link
http://66.249.89.132/translate_c?hl=zh-TW&sl=zh-CN&u=http://chinese.dsturgeon.net/text.pl%3Fnode%3D2733%26if%3Den%26remap%3Dgb&prev=/search%3Fq%3D%25E7%2594%259F%25E4%25B9%259F%25E6%259C%2589%25E6%25B6%25AF%25E7%259F%25A5%25E4%25B9%259F%25E7%2584%25A1%25E6%25B6%25AF%2Btranslation%26hl%3Dzh-TW%26sa%3DG&usg=ALkJrhjdUyrI-nqpIzDwXcwhroEHP0VHnA
Interesting post. A few things:
On redundancy and echo: What you say about echo in the online realm is true. However, sometimes echo is constructive. What's echo for one person may be new information for someone else -- it isn't redundant to post a link to an article if a few of your readers haven't read about it. Plus, redundancy in news is natural -- there's a lot of redundancy if you watch every news station on TV too, but who does that? What about redundancy in literature – why is it even necessary then to write more papers on Hamlet? You juxtapose “words that have rung true for centuries” with “words that are no more than a day old.” Is it really possible that there is more redundancy in the present? Or is it just that information is more accessible today?
On the idea of authorship: It seems like the question of “who said what when” isn't a difficult question if you're willing to look into it, given that you were able to map the chronology of blog responses to “The Quiet Coup” pretty explicitly. I feel like what you're concerned with isn't so much the idea of authorship – linking back to the source is pretty common online – but the idea of originality. Yet in your second point, you assert that the quality of blogs and bloggers has increased over time -- your CleanTechnica anecdote is evidence of this. Maybe what you're really concerned is whether good, original ideas are drowned out by all the echo.
To this, I offer: One, there is no reason to be gun shy. I hadn't read “The Quiet Coup.” Now that I have, I doubt I'll read all the expert opinions on it. Even if I do, I still wouldn't mind reading your thoughts – even if they aren't 100% original -- because I know you. Two, I suppose what you can say about certain topics is redundant because you're less knowledgeable. Perhaps some issues can and should be better articulated by professors and experts. In this regard, I find your previous post “Bay Area Culture” much less redundant and probably far more interesting than what you can tell me about economic recession.
Hope this is encouraging?
Thanks for these comments, Han. A lot of good points.
A couple of things in response:
1) Broadly speaking, I would say that there are two different types of blogs. One type belongs in the public sphere of ideas and could theoretically be of interest to anybody. The other type is more private in nature and is generally of interest to a smaller group of people who are in some way or another connected to the author. I'd say that my blog straddles the two ends of the spectrum, so there isn't much clarity in terms of my audience, who I'm writing for or even why I am writing. So this I think is a source of confusion. The redundancy and echo occurs primarily in the public idea type of blog.
2) I think you're right to say that the anxiety is about originality of thought. When I think about the blogosphere, I have an image in my mind of a consumptive monster constantly churning and feeding upon itself. You get a sense that a thousand people are thinking the same thing about the same public ideas. And in real time.
Maybe this isn't all that different from pre-Internet days, but the multitude of voices are amplified through such a democratic medium as blogs, which I think can be disorienting.
3) I think that something much larger is at stake here, at least at the periphery of what we're discussing. And that is, why write at all? I won't venture a comprehensive answer to that question, but I think it has to do with balancing engagement with the public realm of ideas with a healthy sense of the limitations of one's own perspective. The importance of finding your own voice and how your spin does in fact differ from the million other voices.
It's a process, right? Why take photos of the same objects that millions of other people have taken photos of? What are you hoping to capture or accomplish?
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