Too much information…
Last week I wondered about blogging and audience in the context of encouraging better writing on Pirate Blog (my students’ effort) and noticing certain movements in the readership of Rhetorica. In the comments to that entry I said my advice to new bloggers is “do it well, and stick to it.”
The “stick to it” part recognizes that audience, attention, and influence in the blogosphere may have as much to do with longevity as it does with quality. As famous bloggers drop out, there’s more potential recognition and readership for those left. [Note: Blogosphere news in this regard: Bob Somerby, of The Daily Howler, has announced he's taking a "sabbatical" from which he may not return.]
But what constitutes “doing it well”?
The first best answer is that bloggers should do what they see fit within the confines of their own talents, passions, and purposes.
Beyond that, let me suggest that the best blogs, no matter the topic or the ideology, spend more time dealing in knowledge and wisdom than in information. I’m bracketing entertaining blogs out of this discussion because I don’t think entertainment needs much justification (it also complicates my argument).
I’m working with Neil Postman’s conceptions of these terms:
Information: Statements about facts in the world.
Knowledge: Organized information embedded in a context.
Wisdom: The capacity to know what body of knowledge is relevant to the solution of significant problems.
Postman believed, and I agree, that we are drowning in information today, and some of that information is false (facts are facts, but information is a statement about a fact). Information itself is nearly useless without context and organization.
Postman considered the internet an information medium rather than a “truth” medium. I disagree with this assertion because it seems to separate a medium from those who (intentionally) use it. A medium conveys “truth” in certain ways, and certain media convey different “truths” differently. And, sometimes, certain media are not capable of conveying certain kinds of “truth.” I consider the internet to be essentially a text-based medium and, therefore, capable of delivering knowledge and wisdom if that is how we choose to use it.
Much of what I see in the blogosphere is mere information followed by opinion (I’m as guilty of this as anyone else…just look at the entry before this one). As Postman reminds us:
Any fool can have an opinion; to know what one needs to know to have an opinion is wisdom; which is another way of saying that wisdom means knowing what questions to ask about knowledge.
It is exactly this “knowing what questions to ask about knowledge” that I see on the very best blogs. And that makes me optimistic about the internet as a medium and blogging as a genre.
Rethinking Weblogs
Yet again Rhetorica says it best, so much of Weblog management is sticking to it. Several former Weblog managers have told me that they felt an awesome sense of responsibility to be witty and insightful on a daily basis. In…
well said, indeed, Rhetoric and Weblogs are a scary subject to think about…