Blogosphere as a community
A couple of weeks ago, while trodding through wind and water to a Secret Blogger Inner Circle Meeting bar, I realized that I have been (sorta) wrong. I have been arguing that the Blogosphere is not a community - but in fact, there is a community called Blogosphere. It just might be that nobody belongs to it. But it seems that you can treat it as a community, since there is always someone that reacts to things in the same way the entire Blogosphere would. It probably is not the same person each and every time, but the net effect is that it appears as if the Blogosphere does something or has an opinion.
It works the same way on Slashdot, where one can predict certain comments like clockwork.
A cheekier analogy would be to to equal blogs with genes (he said, hearing the horde of doctors and scientists baring their fangs and preparing to shred this analogy to pieces): A gene has no intelligence, has no concerns, no aims, but yet innumerable counts of them are able to produce something that is coherent and intelligent, in a process that is called evolution. In the same way an unintelligent collection of blogs produce something that can be treated as an entity, no matter whether anyone agrees to be a part of it, or even agrees to what it has to say.
Blogs are individualistic, beautiful voices of the world. The blogosphere is a statistical, chaotic monster of the internet.
From beauty to beast.
Ain't that grand?
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| "Main_blogentry_131105_1" last changed on 13-Nov-2005 20:53:08 EET by JanneJalkanen. |
Comments
Isn't that just 'million monkeys' argument?I'm with you on that though, can I have a banana please?
--psi-, 14-Nov-2005
I think blogs form a very tight community in a certain way - even though people don't acknowledge it. In the recent study that I carried out on the campaign I started, I found out that the blogosphere (a group of blogs in this context) carried out messages a lot quicker from each other to each other than other types of websites. Blogs are also a lot more interlinked between each other than other types of websites.
And these are the basic reasons I would call the blogosphere a certain type of virtual community with very lose boundaries and no concrete way to definy it.
--Antti, 14-Nov-2005
As the net gets older, day by day, It'll imitate life (or life will imitate it). In the early years you'd have communities. Places where people gather. Like a club or a secret gathering place. Now you have people connecting freely. You choose. You don't need to be a part of anything prefabricated.
Life.
--pni, 14-Nov-2005
psi: well, maybe. Does that invalidate the point?
pni: I think you misunderstood. Or maybe I misunderstand you. I'm talking really about the phrase: "If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, it is a duck."
--JanneJalkanen, 14-Nov-2005
Not to forget about the IIPM issue that rocked indian Blogsphere. It was one hell of an incident that proved that Blogosphere is at par with MSM(main stream media) in all corners. Though the MSM may not share my views ;)
--nagu, 15-Nov-2005
IIPM? Eh?
--JanneJalkanen, 15-Nov-2005