Are blogs an exercise in vanity?
The Internet and vanity are no strangers. The eminently mockable vanity inherent in the self-revealing ”personal home pages” of the 1990s — I admit it, I had one on Geocities – can be found once again on MySpace, FaceBook, and personal blogs. But unlike in the 1990s, our vanity is really getting in the way of a really lively, intelligent discourse. Too many people would rather pretend to be broadcasters, which they’ll never be interesting enough to be, than find a neutral ground in which to exchange ideas and engage in a good old-fashioned dialogue. Let’s bring back the discussion list!
I would go on, but I’ll save it for a post on SharedKnowing, the new, but old-fashioned, mailing list discussion about online knowledge communities. Join here.
UPDATE: Digg this!
There is definitely hubris in blogging. However, I wouldn’t say that vanity has entirely obscured intelligent postings. Nor would I say discussion boards are better. From what I’ve seen they can be even less nuetral and just as prone to vanity and pointless chatter as blogs!
The truth is the entertainment industry has always been about the extreme. What article would you choose. “The Rabid Dog Attacks” or “Brown is an Important Color in Dogs”? The article on dog color may be well researched and thought provoking, but it simply won’t draw attention. On either the mainstream media, or bloggers, or discussion lists.
The discussion topic of “Microsoft Stinks” will have 50,000 comments while the one on “Developing better coding techniques” will have 50. The one advantage however is it’s easier to filter–i.e. if there are lots of comments it’s an extreme so you can safely skip over that thread without missing anything.
However, I guess my point is that both discussion lists and blogs suffer from the same human nature that aflicts blogging.
Interesting thoughts though. Best wishes
Comment by Jeff Staddon — October 4, 2007 @ 10:35 am
Vanity blogs are just one flavor of blog. A large proportion of blogs are filled with sensible posts about a wide range of hobbies and interests. There are also a significant number of blogs which tackle important social issues that the mass media tend to gloss over — arguably a valuable public service. I think there’s a risk that intellectual snobbery about the outlets for personal expression on the ‘net might alienate potential CZ authors.
By the way, since the upgrade to the latest MediaWiki version, rel=”nofollow” is once again being added to external links.
Comment by Disaffected Wikipedian — October 4, 2007 @ 11:40 am
There were a flurry of Citizendium blogs today.. this is the only one with a “Digg this” … given the vanity subject it is a bit ironic
Thanks,
GerardM
Comment by GerardM — October 4, 2007 @ 2:42 pm
Did you notice that, Gerard…
Comment by Larry Sanger — October 4, 2007 @ 3:05 pm
One problem is that it’s really tempting to write with reddit and digg in mind — this post got me 2.5 thousand visitors in a single day (and it barely broke the surface tension of reddit) — getting linked to in the los angeles times got me maybe a quarter of that (though half of them subscribed).
Er — the problem being that the whole premise of the made-for-reddit post was a bit of a stretch, and possibly damaged my credibility in the long run (certainly it would if I did it very often). I reflexively jumped at the “multinational corporation versus open source people power” angle because I knew it would draw traffic — but that’s not the way to build readership. You have to be ultra-disciplined, basically. Newspaper journalists already know this kind of thing; bloggers are (hopefully) learning.
Comment by Ben Yates — October 8, 2007 @ 12:19 am