I’d be thankful to hear some responses to “The Fallacy of the Universal Reporter” from proponents of Blogarian Emergent Democracy (essay by António Guerreiro, found via the indefatigable and indispensable wood s lot).
I adhere both to a positive view of the possibilities of online communication, and to a unromantic view of democracy as a mode of large-scale social organization. I suspect that one of the strongest points on behalf of Blogaria as a communicative regime lies (paradoxically) in Clay’s unpopular power-law observation. Guerreiro represents Blogarian Emergent Democracy (hereafter BED, if I refer to it again) as justifying its optimism on the basis that “the more voices heard, the better” and “There is a virtue in noise, every lost voice impoverishes our world,” quoting from a post he claims to have found on Pacheco Pereira's weblog. Yet isn’t the benefit of BED the likelihood that certain articulate positions that would not have cracked the media hegemony can not only find audiences online, but indeed can attract a sizable following distinct from print- or broadcast-media endorsement? In other words, isn’t a Shirkyan inevitable A-List one of the positive emergent characteristics of online communication?
That’s not a claim that I advocate Blogarian dittohead behavior; I think the power law would yield more interesting results if it could incorporate the much-mooted Vote Links. (I take particular self-justifying interest in the elbow of the power law distribution, down where I live, where I [humbly] think the most intriguing and promising characteristics of online communication emerge). But isn’t there an argument to be made that the “-cracy” part of BED entails the “election” of particular sites, or voices, or whatever, as the People’s Choices — when few if any of those electees would have nearly so great an audience in offline communication?
But since I’m a booster of online communication more than of BED, perhaps I’m mis-anticipating what the advocates for the defense would say. I’m curious.
Posted by AKMA at April 10, 2004 01:25 PM | TrackBack