AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Blood in Vienna

A while back, Phil Wolff urged me to read and comment on Rebecca Blood’s presentation from the Vienna Blogtalk conference. I had seen David Weinberger’s blogged report of her talk, so I had an idea what she might have said, and then she kindly posted the text of her address.

And it’s good. It’s for conversation (and if Richard Rorty and The Cluetrain Manifesto agree on something, it must be. . . well, an aberration). It’s for peace and understanding, (which are not so funny). So I agree in several respects, particularly when she highlights Slugger O’Toole’s efforts to engender constructive exchange of perspectives in Ireland, and Rashmi Sinha’s blog Dialog Now (which aims at comparable interaction across the India-Pakistan conflict).

I hope it’s not too querulous for me to dissent from Blood’s argument at a couple of points. Most important, I’m not convinced that there’s deep relevance in the contrast between the echo-bloggers she mentions (on one hand) and the mediators (on the other). The obvious differences go without saying: echo-bloggers aim at self-reinforcing din, whereas mediators aim at interaction across the lines of conflict. But how big a problem does echo-blogging constitute?

For one thing, few groups can subsist as tightly-sealed as Blood suggests. I don’t question her description of specific circles of mutually-supportive warbloggers and peacebloggers. I do wonder how typical they are: not in terms of their ideological emphasis, but in terms of their impermeable discourse.

I reckon — and I don’t think I regularly read echo-blogs, so I may be off base — that there can be too many monophonic blog circles. I read Josh Marshall, don’t read Instapundit, but I don’t encounter many blogs that echo Marshall. Most (not all) of the blogs I read remain staunchly anti-war, whereas Marshall was reluctantly pro-war. I didn’t stop reading Marshall when he made his case for conquering Iraq (though I don’t know how many of my online friends read him). One would think that echo-blogs would tend to collapse into fairly rigid, mutually-exclusive circles of self-congratulation, offering little reasons for anyone who’s not already one of the ideologically pure to join in. Blood herself observes, “In the summer of 2001, I began to notice that my usual round of weblogs had become rather boring.” One would think, then, that tedium would constitute an effective disincentive to echo-blog (except among those whose hunger for approval impels them to fawning repetition and hyperbolic approval).

Blood’s audience in Vienna was not, however constituted of people inclined to echo-blog, so far as I can tell. And I’m not sure that echo-bloggers who read Blood’s presentation would be likely to convert; the impulse to blog, for an echo-blogger, involves exactly the mutual affirmation that mediators eschew.

Now clearly, very few members of the set of all non-echo-bloggers sponsor mediating blogs. Most of the folks whom I read bounce around among the sites of some friends, about whom we mostly say favorable things. We’re friends; that’s how that goes. But there’s a quantum difference, I think, between a circle of friends and an echo-blog. Among the most significant distinctions, one can look at a circle of friends and observe points at which each particular friend diverges from most others. I don’t end up reading many blog written by postmodern Christian theologians. Mercy, I don’t even read many blogs written by people who’re explicitly Christians (apart from Seabury blogs), and some of my most common correspondents have spoken pretty forcefully against postmodern thought. And arguments across ideological lines don’t reliably produce insight more often than they produce flames and annoying repetition of non-points.

Moreover, I have a hard time thinking of more than a couple of bloggers who fit a single ideological profile (I can think of a few). And it’s just our constitutive diversity — the extent to which most bloggers bring to their writing a complex array of various interests and commitments. For or against the Conquest of Iraq? Dave Winer? Blogger or Moveable Type? Christian, Jewish, atheist, Buddhist? And among those who allow comments, the constitutive diversity rises significantly further.

I don’t think that’s what Rebecca Blood was worried about, so I don’t think I’m rebutting her argument; that’s why I suggested that tedious echo-blogging doesn’t necessarily overlap enough with mediation-blogging to make the case for Slugger or Dialog Now stronger. The value of mediation-blogging shines out brightly on its own, and the dead-end of echo-blogging bedarkens discourse by itself, and the rest of us draw various other interesting parties into conversation in unpredictable patterns.

If I were to sum up, I'd say that I wonder what's the effect of urging a pretty open-minded bunch of bloggers to be more interactive.

I’m all for interactivity, somewhat dubious about trying to talk people into it. I’m against homogeneity, but I don’t see that much of it (perhaps that means I'm a closeted echo-blogger in denial, or perhaps I’m boasting about my discursively-active friends). I’m for Slugger and Rashmi, and for circles of friends, and am excited that Blogaria makes both possible in new ways.

Posted by AKMA at June 10, 2003 08:18 AM | TrackBack