Steve Johnson on conventional wisdom: I think he makes a good argument. We do have many more options of where and when we get our information, and the barrier to entry is sufficiently low as to allow the likes of the Drudge Report and yours truly an equal presence . . .
stevenberlinjohnson.com: Our Fragmented Web:
“Slow down and work through the logic here: spam filters are invoked as yet another indication of the echo-chamber effect. Now, who is winning right now: the spam or the filters? Obviously, the spam is winning — nobody’s walking around complaining that they miss the days when they’d get a completely spontaneous penis-enlargement ad in their inbox, despite the fact that they’re opposed to penis-enlargement in general. The filters are there because there are so many voices flooding our inboxes and our browsers that we need tools to fight back. You don’t have filters on television or old-fashioned newspapers because you don’t need them — there’s not enough diversity and chaos to justify them. But the web — and particularly the blogosphere — is far more eclectic and cross-pollinating than any of those older media. That’s the real story. Writing about the rise of filters as a sign of web insularity is like writing about the heat wave we’re having here in New York right now because everyone’s bundled up in parkas.”
OK, the last analogy doesn’t register for me, but I think I see his point otherwise. The argument that we’re all typing into the darkness and losing touch with our physical human selves — our need to connect with others — may have been true in 1997 or so, but the technology has come far enough to lower the barrier to entry and motivate people to create MeetUp and similar ideas. What is Howard Dean’s internet presence about but the use of these technologies to link up like minds and get their physical owners together for a shared purpose?
[Posted with ecto]