Why we all think alike (except for liberals)

Ginger Stampley quotes Oliver Willis as to complaints about the lack of significant differences of opinion in the blogosphere these days, and weighs in with some comments of her own. Willis, e.g., writes: Spend an hour or two at Weblogs.com or Blogger.com and just click through a bunch of blogs. I do it all the time because I want to hear fresh voices. Sure, for every good blog I sift through 30 crappy ones - oh well. But the coolness of blogging is more than the whole "warblog" thing. Already 90% of the warblogs are caught in an endless echo chamber where they just friggin' parrot each other" and Stampley agrees: Along those lines, I have been really enjoying the sojourn of Brian Linse's assistant, Stephanie Dupont, as ringmistress over on Ain't No Bad Dude (not just because she was kind enough to wish me well from the flu, either). The warblogosphere takes itself too damn seriously, and she's a breath of fresh air in what is becoming in many ways an increasingly incestuous community." Well, aside from Dupont’s evident, umm, lack of depth, I think that Willis and Stampley miss the point: the blogosphere is a massive PHI-DEL. For those not as up on the jargon of ‘60s project management as I, PHI-DEL was supposed to be the next step after brainstorming. Everyone wrote down their ideas; copies of all ideas were distributed to all participants (without names and titles). Everyone then commented on the ideas; the comments were also distributed to all participants, who rewrote their ideas in light of everyone else’s ideas and comments. After n iterations of this process (n being determined by how much slush you had in the budget), a consensus would emerge. Of course, PHI-DEL was slow, expensive, and painful; not unexpected when the dissemination of an idea meant writing it in longhand on a piece of dead tree, and then handing it over to a secretary to be typed, mimeographed, and sent via interoffice snail-mail to others. Now, of course, we have blogs, which means that, for any given number of people, the process is much faster. Now, of course, the blogosphere doesn’t make up a single community; not every person is directly linked to every other person in it. So ideas get bounced around and back and forth. OTOH, this process is how Matt Welch and Bill Quick end up approvingly quoting each other and writing, "My earlier remarks need correction in light of…" So, Ginger, Oliver, you needn’t worry too much. What you’re seeing is the result of thousands of people talking to each other, rather than at each other, as too often happens in any setting more contentious that deciding what to watch on TV. It’s unfamiliar, of course; it’s been decades, at least, since reasoned discourse was replaced by shouting, demonstrating, and throwing cream pies (some would argue that reasoned discourse has never been resorted to on any appreciable scale). But you’ll get used to it in time. John "Akatsukami" Braue Wednesday, February 27, 2002

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