Blogs As Hysterical Echo Chambers

Articles like this one are why I subscribe to the RSS feeds of every site where I know Clay Shirky writes.  He nails one of the things that's problematic about blogs that purport to cover current events.  Other people write often and intelligently about the interplay between blogging and journalism.  I scan that conversation, because it's intellectually interesting to me, but rarely have much to add.   

One thing I have learned since reading blogs and drafting my own is that I have very, very low tolerance for blogs that simply point to articles written by newspapers and/or other bloggers, taking the article at face value and commenting on it without adding a particular or distinctive perspective.  It's why I don't often point you to articles or chime in on current events here.  You can find those things on your own, and unless I have something very special to add that comes out of my experience, I suspect you can draw entirely sensible conclusions without my help. 

The best thing about weblogs is the chance to establish trust with people far away, by hearing and reading the authentic voices and the daily experiences and the thoughts that engage the minds of people who have different lives and different perspectives than I do.  The echo chamber effect that Clay describes can only come when people decide to act as messengers rather than authors of stories.  I don't think that's what blogs are for. 

I'll try not to do it myself.  Does this post break the rule it establishes?  My head hurts....

[UPDATE: I could have said this all much shorter, by saying: if you blog, use your blog to tell me what you know.  Don't tell me what someone else wrote somewhere else.  Google can do that way way better than you can.  Tell me what you know, and how you know it.  Even better if it's something only you can know, like how you feel or what you see or why you something's meaningful.]

Comments

[ogged]

Link blogs serve their own purpose. There's so much written every day that I can't keep up, so someone with a similar sensibility who reads things for me, and picks out the best of the day, is valuable.

[Dylan]

Exactly. Blogs that often link without commentary are useful to those who like the same stuff as the blogger but don't have time to find it. It's a terribly inefficient way to run a news/trivia filter, but there's nothing better yet.

[Ms. Feverish]

Heavy linking or "filter-blogging" as it is sometimes called is actually part of the origins of blogging--that's what blogging was when the first few folks started making software that we now use to tell our stories. There are many old-timers who still don't think its a "real" blog without links.

I agree though that blogs that only re-hash news I can find myself are rarely as interesting as the ones that tell good stories.

[Tim]

I tend to agree, and I chastise myself every time I fail to say something that isn't already in the article or post that I'm linking to. I especially try not to "re-blog" topics that others in the legal blogging community have addressed unless I can add something new. But I make exceptions to that rule if I want to point to something I know will interest those few people who read my blog but not many other blogs.

I find a lot of gems when people just provide links as a way of saying, "hey, have a look at this." I discover a lot of blogs that way, among them many of my favorites.

I've recently thought that I want to add more links to things that I find interesting, but Movable Type seems to encourage long posts, and I don't want to use full posts for simple links.

I thought I might use an "Asides" or "Blink"-style minipost for some of those kinds of things, but that still runs a risk of creating an "echo chamber." Perhaps I should confine linkage-without-commentary to del.icio.us, where the determined can still see what I link to if they really want to, but it doesn't get in the way of the blog.

[Tim]

On the other hand, just linking to something (without commentary) isn't quite the same thing as linking to an article and uncritically typing something along the lines of OMG THEY'RE COMING TO SHUT US DOWN!!!1

[dan]

It's hard to tell when your rule comes into play. I like to collect groups of stories that have some thematic link, and group them together with a thin bit of commentary that suggests why I selected them. This only constitutes about 20% of my posts, however. Most are original commentary. On the other hand, one of my favorite reading spots is Fark.com, which could be accused of the crime you discuss. Still, it's reliably fascinating.