more please
Dave points to a great "citizen-blogger." Perfect, but we need many more.
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» Citizen bloggers from Northfield.org
Stanford Law Professor and a-list blogger Lawrence Lessig has a post on his weblog about citizen bloggers... with a number of comments attached to the post, including one from me about what we're trying to do with our civic blogosphere... [Read More]
» Citizen Bloggers from Citizen Wig
I posted a note to the Northfield.org weblog last night about how Stanford Law Professor and a-list blogger Lawrence Lessig has a post on his weblog about citizen bloggers... with a number of comments attached to the post, including one... [Read More]
» Citizen Blogger from Read/Write Web
I've been getting more and more interested in the concept of a "Citizen Blogger": a person who actively participates in politics via their weblog. For such a person, weblogging becomes a political act - an 'Uncle Sam Needs You' for... [Read More]
Comments (34)
It's a seductive dream. I understand the appeal, of an engaged citizenry all reading and writing to each other. But the mathematics of it, just doesn't work.
There's very little influence in writing a report read by just a few dozen people. Yes, we can get misty-eyed about about Town Meetings and such. But the fact of the matter is, such civic activism reaches a tiny, tiny percentage of the voters. We can't all have a million readers.
If the reports are being pushed by the A-list, then we are simply back to the same-old, same-old, a pundit class where a few hold vast power.
It's the same game, how to get the nod of *gatekeeper*, how to get that single person who can deliver the audience. Structurally, this is no different from what has gone before, from the point of view of the have-nots.
Seth's comment doesn't take into account the fact that in the blogosphere there are all levels of gradation between the A-list bloggers and those with just a few readers. And the borders are completely porous at all levels.
In the offline world, if you write a letter on some subject and make 5 photocopies and send the letter to 5 friends, that is very unlikely to lead to a top-tier NY Times reporter covering it.
But in the blog world, if one of your readers has more readership -- and one of his readers has more readership, etc., you idea can travel "up the ranks" until it is indeed linked to by an a-list blogger.
Also, it may be that an a-list blogger sees your trackback or sees your new post listed on weblogs.com and decides to check it out. So by random factors there is a chance that your idea can skip several levels and move up the ranks quite quickly.
These effects either can't happen in the offline world or can, but with so much effort and trouble on the part of the middle people that they almost certainly won't.
So while Seth has a point, it is too black-and-white. The gatekeeper effect does exist in the blog world, but the difference is that it's easier to overcome it. The blog world is in fact better for citizenry making a difference. And it has happened already, with sites such as Groklaw coming out of nowhere to have a significant impact.
Look, in the papersphere, there are all levels of gradation between the major newspapers and people writing graphitti on bathroom walls. And the borders are about as porous too (well, maybe a little less, but I doubt as much different as people think).
In the online world, if you write a posting on some subject and put it in your livejournal with 5 readers, that is very unlikely to lead to an A-list blogger linking to it.
*IT CAN'T*. The numbers don't support it. There's only a very few slots for such stories in terms of audience attention. This is simple mathematics.
In the offline world, if you know someone, who knows a local reporter, and they know a national reporter, your idea can travel "up the ranks" until it is indeed in the major media. It's happened to a very few people. But it can only happen to a very few people because of the hard limit on the number of *major audience* slots.
Just like a New York Times editor might see your letter in a local newspaper or that you've been mentioned by an influential person they know. It's possible. It can happen. But for 99.99% of the people, it *won't*.
It may not be black-and-white, but it's the difference between 99.99% and 99.999%.
These statements can both be true:
1) In the blog world, you have 10 times the chance of making a big difference compared to the traditional media (that is, say, 1 in 10,000 vs 1 in 100,000)
2) In both blog world and traditional media, your chances of succeeding at making a big difference is minuscule. (9,999 fail out of 10,000 vs. 99,999 fail out of 100,000).
But everyone thinks they're going to be that one lottery winner.
Arguing with Seth is one of my least favorite things about cyberspace, but at least it proves (but probably not to Seth) that something different is going on here.
Anyway, Larry and I have been emailing for about a month, trying to figure out what our common values are, because somehow intuitively it seems that we have them.
This term, "citizen blogger" has something to do with it. The idea that an individual taking an interest in his or her citizenship, is a good thing, an American thing, a First Amendment thing. That's it's happening on an electronic medium is no longer that big a deal Seth, because in 2004 so much communication is electronic.
So what I hope to do is codify (a term both Larry and I use in our respective spheres) what a citizen blogger is, so as to differentiate it from the "clubby blogger" who writes about his or her favorite flavor of pancakes, and how that's changed over the years. I love to read those blog posts, from my 10 year old neice, but that's not why I blog. That's one of the reasons I nuked my blogroll, to see what would shift. I support citizen blogging, blogging as a political act. This is what I want to understand.
The usual disclaimers apply, this is not spec text, I am not a lawyer, my mother loves me, I mean well, yes I have a bad attitude, etc etc.
This is a comment from outside -- from Toronto -- so feel free to say/think that I'm not part of the conversation that you're all having and ignore this as beside the point.
I wanted to say to Dave that he's drawing too bright a line between the "political" and the "non-political." It's usefully true that all social interaction has deep and wide sources and deep and wide consequences.
I'm not about to do a riff on his "pancake flavor" example -- didn't know they came in flavors -- but there ain't nothing apolitical about consumer goods in North America. Of course if your aim is to elect Mr. Edwards or Dean or Whomever, pancake politics might be under your radar very nearly all the time. Understood.
I just wanted to suggest that he won't be able to (and shouldn't) herd blogs into "Civic" and "Pancake" categories so easily.
Cheers,
Simon
Simon, some blogs are about being member of a club and some blogs are a citizen reporting on events. People who do clubby blogs are doing something very different from the citizen blogs. And pancakes do come in flavors -- regular, buttermilk, blueberry, to name a few. Not trying to herd. Personally I find citizen blogs more useful. And I like all flavors of pancakes but they're not good for me, and I know it. ;->
For years I ran the Civic Journalism program at Minnesota Public Radio. Now I run the Public Journalism Network, PJNET.org, in addition to teach at Kennesaw State University outside of Atlanta.
When we ran face-to-face public meetings at MPR, the reporters would usually scoff at the idea. What do the people have to say? I suppose even the people felt relatively powerless.
But put it into a different context. If five people are caught exchanging ideas on a corner in a country run by a dictator, they have a good chance of getting jailed, tortured or killed.
The dictators know something we in a relatively free country forget. A few people can be the catalyst for major changes. In other words, dictators understand the power of people exchanging ideas far better than we do. One would think it should be the other way around.
Seth,
"Dave, the mathematics exists independent of me. If you must get personal about it, consider that as an EFF Pioneer Award winner, and also as someone who won aDMCA exemption, I just might, I tell you, just might, have something to say, some insight, which is worth listening to."
If you must get personal about it, I do statistics in my day to day work, and have contributed a mathematical approach that is now used by SpamAssassin (winner of PC mag editor's choice award), Spambayes, hexamail, bogofilter, and other spam filters.
How did the people working on those filters come to know about my ideas? The world doesn't know of me as a mathematician -- prior to this I had no published papers in mathematics, for example.
But I've been independently working on these concepts for quite some time, and when I published a piece on my UserLand Radio blog (top return from Google at http://www.google.com/search?q=%22spam+detection%22&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8), people saw it, tested the performance against other techniques that were extant at the time, discussed it on mail lists, and adopted it in their spam filters. This led eventually to the opportunity to publish an article in Linux Journal, but that was AFTER the technique was already widely adopted.
This would have been extremely unlikely to happen in the papersphere, but it in fact happened in the blogosphere. I also pointed to Groklaw, which is not a dissimilar phenomenon. We could point to other phenomona as well.
And it should happen like this because despite your denial, the mathematics of it do make sense. You aren't thinking about the mathematics of this deeply enough. Period.
Oh and by the way, I am hardly an a-list blogger.
All politics is local. Presidential candidates don't spring fully formed from the head of Zeus, they start out as business owners, state legislators, etc. If people in my immediate circle of influence (both real and virtual) think about what I say and act on it, then I've contributed to the discourse. To dismiss that contribution because the New York Times doesn't care what I think is to miss the point.
Looking at it another way, suppose I have ten readers. Suppose I and each of my readers brings ten people to the polls in support of a particular goal. That's 110 votes, more than enough to swing many local elections. Multiply that by 10,000 citizen bloggers, and you get 11 million votes, more than enough to swing a national election, even though none of the sites individually gets a large enough audience to register on the mass media radar.
Seth defines the terms of success as the terms of the centralized system, so of course the decentralized system loses in his evaluation. But what if, instead of reaching the most people, I want to reach the right people. Even though my circ is a tiny fraction of the NY Times, I get that. I can find the one piece of data I want by writing about it and setting the blogosphere on a discovery process, if they find it interesting. So there's the relationship. The blogger tweaks the minds of the people who read his or her blog. And gets back data, points of view, etc. It's like email but broader. Seth, if you'd listen, for once, and stop hearing what you want to hear, instead of what's being said, I might not dread your negative comments. You always try to make me argue something I don't believe. My goal isn't to replicate the mass monoculture media. And yes, I am an A-lister. Sorry. :-(
One aspect is that, in order for one's ideas to percolate up to the top in the blogosphere, they have to in fact be deemed worthy of more attention at each layer along the way.
If they aren't, they won't percolate up. Maybe that's the limitation Seth finds frustrating. An advantage is that those layers do exist. Success at the lower levels makes it far easier to get the attention of the a-list "gatekeepers" than if there were no middle layers.
Yes, the mathematics are such that most things that random people say will not percolate to the top. However, it is MUCH easier for WORTHY things to rise to the top in the blogosphere than elsewhere, because of the fact that there are so many porous levels between the a-listers and the rabble, and those porous levels can and do help worthy ideas rise up.
Dave's point to Seth, "You always try to make me argue something I don’t believe" is interesting. Seth's viewpoint is very polarized, so I argue against it, even though I agree that there is truth in what he says. Even thought the blogosphere is much better than the papersphere in the ability for the good stuff to rise to the top, it COULD be much better than it currently is. Technology could help a lot, and many companies are working to address that. (My own company has ideas in that area that we're evaluating, in fact.)
Gary, I don't believe there is a top of the blogosphere.
Just my opinion, of course. (Kind of proves my point, tho.)
This is really interesting. Gary makes a really good point here, that it's much easier for worthy things to rise to the top in the blogosphere than elsewhere. But then again, its up to the "A-listers" to decide what's worthy.
With the paper media, it's a choice of the editors what to publish.
With sites like slashdot, users can submit articles. Moderators decide what's good enough to be posted on the main page. If not the main page, maybe it's good enough to be posted on a topics page (eg, "games" or "your rights online").
The blogosphere is just extending this further. Every blogger is a moderator. A blogger decides what to put on his site. Then, the burden is on the readers of that blog to decide what's important. If a reader likes something, he may reference that post on his own blog. If that reader's site is more popular, the topic rises. If it rises enough times by being seen and liked by a few levels of more popular weblog authors, the topic "makes it" to the top, say appearing on a site like this one with a large readership, or even on a site like slashdot with an enormous readership.
It seems that more layers of filtering can do a better job directing new topics to the audience most likely to want to read about that topic, and is more efficient that a 1-level system like slashdot has.
The question that I think of next is this: how can we do better? Gary says it could be much better with technology's help. I am eager to see what is next.
One idea is to reduce the burden on readers to find blogs that interest them. Trackbacks are a step towards this, but I think better tools will emerge.
As for Dave's comment that he doesn't think there is a top of the blogosphere: How are we defining top? If you rank by readership, there certainly is a top. If you don't care about that, then it is more safe to make that sort of claim.
"Gary, I don’t believe there is a top of the blogosphere." Dave, do you mean that new people can rise to the top?
I'd certainly agree with that -- merit can rise to the top in the blogosphere more easily than elsewhere. So there is in that sense no hard-and-fast top. OTOH, at any point in time, there are a-lister bloggers, and you have named yourself as one. So it appears that at any point in time, there is a top -- a few people with a lot more power to grant attention than the rest of us have.
As you know, this top is defined mathematically, as has been frequently discussed, as the top tiers of a distribution that is approximately the Zipf distribution.
Again, I agree that this top is very different from the top in the papersphere because it is much more changeable and possibly merit-based, rather than simply being set in stone by the powers-that-own-the-presses.
Hmm, or maybe "there is no top" means there are different pools of interest, and attention goes to the worthy items in those pools of interest, often without ever needing the help of a-listers who have the top readership globally. That's true too.
If you made a relation on the set of readers based on the following rule:
(A,B) is in the relation R if and only if reader A reads person B's blog
If you gave me, on paper, a directed graph representing this relation, I am at least fairly confident I could circle the part of the graph that most people would agree is the "top".
After reading another post, make that "partS of the graph" instead of "part of the graph"
Sorry.
"If you gave me, on paper, a directed graph representing this relation, I am at least fairly confident I could circle the part of the graph that most people would agree is the “top”."
I think it's a little more complicated though, because there are different pools of interest, many of which are small. So someone might get a lot of attention within the pool of interest of "dog manicure" who would not be part of the "the top" from the general point of view. But from the local point of view, he would be a "gatekeeper" for that pool of interest.
maybe that's what you mean by "partS of the graph"? But pools of interest flow into each other... I'm not even sure there would be descrete "parts of the graph". Maybe. I'm not sure.
Katherine: If everyone in the US sent me a dime, just one thin dime, I'd be rich. But that's not going to happen. So arguments of the form "If thousands and thousands of people did X ...", beg the question. Thousands and thousands of people won't do X just because we wish it so, just because it would be nice if that happened. Moreover, if you're looking to bring voters to the polls, low-audience blogging is overall, an *extremely* inefficient way of doing it. The people you reach are very likely those people who are already interested, i.e. preaching to the choir. So what happens is roughly that 11 similarly-minded people all talk to themselves, and each person pats themselves on the back for bringing in 10 new voters!
Dave: You reach several thousand people, with a significant amount of power. There is nothing wrong with that. But it is far above the average citizen. Note Jay McCarthy, being pointed to above, is *not* someone picked randomly. He's an acquaintance of yours (no offense, he's a good guy, but that's a connection). This is *much* more like an intern in the New York Times getting a mention by being a crony of the city editor, rather than a random citizen having his ideas percolate to the top through force of merit (which should rebut the point Gary made about worth!)
Moreover, I understand your point. I simply don't think it means anywhere near what is touted. From what I've observed, it's the exact same game in the blogosphere as the papersphere. Working connections, trying to get attention of the audience gatekeepers, competing for the very few slots which exist. And orders of magnitude difference between the top and the bottom.
To all the people saying it's "easier", I challenge, come up with a measurement, some rough handle, something other than someone won a lottery and you too can win a lottery. I want to know, what are the *odds* in that lottery?
Citizen bloggers - the real point being there are many ways to participate, but without participation, there can be no democracy.
Democracy is about community - and the discourse that takes place in (and creates and maintains) that community.
There are many kinds of blogs and varieties of bloggers. But there is certainly a growing use of the internet - slowly but surely - which is opening up the routes to a more substantive, active, educated, informed, and participating citizen.
The Weekly Standard this week I think really showed the difference - when they attacked Howard Dean, the Dean blog and bloggers (and myself explicitly).
It really shows the difference between the two kinds of usages:
The one, the Bush blog, which the author James Last thought was a model example of a properly functioning blog - was described as a system of one-way communication (not sure communication is thus the right word). A third-person (impersonal) press-release style system of telling subjects what to think, and allowing them the LIMITED role of choosing to accept or reject it, was seen as the model of democracy.
And this is not surprising - as this is exactly how the mainstream of political science (my discipline) has re-defined democracy in the latter-half of the twentieth century. The assumption is that the citizen is not capable of being such - but can only choose between two (and two is deemed the most "efficient" and "effective" at producing their desired end) - and thus must be reduced to the role of a mere subject, with the limited role of choosing among two competing sets of elites every two or four years (and is thus really reduced to the status of subject - but believing in the myth of democracy).
Well that is simply not sufficient for maintaining a democratic polity and society. The Dean blog, on the other hand, was criticized (using my posts) for being a "community" - and the fact that the issue was about US (the Dean bloggers and others engaged in the campaign), and not about the candidate (the elite we get to choose) was deemed "Creepy" by the Weekly Standard. It was seen as laughable that instead of voting for an ideology, people would actually vote to support THEMSELVES!
Herein I think we find the divide between the two kinds of blogs and bloggers. The Citizen blog/blogger [three-way - the addressor, the addressee, and the observing (and often jumping in) group] - and the mere information source [one-way - the elite-leader TO the subject-follower].
Charlie
"This is *much* more like an intern in the New York Times getting a mention by being a crony of the city editor, rather than a random citizen having his ideas percolate to the top through force of merit (which should rebut the point Gary made about worth!)"
I hesitate to even point out the obvious fact that an anecdote of an instance of something that may not have risen by merit does not "rebut" a point that things CAN rise by merit. It's just a silly statement. I hesitate to point it out because I expect that any continuation of that discussion will just result in more of the same.
I won't comment on the rest of Seth's last post for similar reasons.
It is important to read that portion in context with the rest of my post.
One CAN win the lottery. What are the odds?
Seth, that's some challenge. A lottery metaphor seems to assume it is appropriate to talk about odds. Can we do that the way you suggest even though merit is also involved?
Suppose we could come up with odds as you mentioned. Is it a sure thing that the odds of a good piece of writing "rising up" decrease as the number of bloggers increases? More bloggers could mean more readers and more references and more trackbacks and more interconnections. Is it possible this could increase those odds?
I don't know what the Zipf distribution is as mentioned above, so maybe I am missing some key thing here. If so, please inform me.
"Is it possible this could increase those odds?" I agree with your implication that the key is that the odds as the number of bloggers increase. The odds can't be computed without running some very controlled (and difficult-to-set-up) experiments, and they would be dependent on the number of people in any given interest-pool, and as well as other factors such as the passion people have for the subject.
Note that I would assert that the key isn't purely the number of bloggers, but that the "rising up" phenomenon also requires the fact that the bloggers are distributed such that all levels of popularity tend to be filled out (in rough accordance with the zipf distribution, which google can find a lot of references to).
When I say that "he odds as the number of bloggers increase" I don't mean that the odds of any randomly chosen idea posted by some blogger will rise to the top. I mean the odds increase that the MOST WORTHY ideas will rise to the top. Of course when there are more bloggers, the odds decrease that any randomly chosen idea will rise to the top because there is only so much room at the top, and more ideas are competing for that space.
Seth, you began this discussion saying: "It’s a seductive dream. I understand the appeal, of an engaged citizenry all reading and writing to each other. But the mathematics of it, just doesn’t work.
'There’s very little influence in writing a report read by just a few dozen people. "
A couple of weeks ago I did an op-ed piece for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/1203/24_witt.html
I wrote it because I was watching the electronic voting machine debate for months on the Internet. Here, in part, what is what I wrote:
" I have been following this story for months on Internet Weblogs, but it remained below the radar screen of the national press. Then the New York Times recently had a small story basically summarizing the high points of what was being said on the Web. At about the same time, presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich posted key documents that Diebold was trying to have removed from blogger sites. Then New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote another summary of the information that has been floating around the Web for months."
Very little influence? Hardly. Is that an extreme example? Yes. But, Seth, what is wrong with this little conversation we are having now.
If Dave is a A-lister, and we are citizens who can get the ear of an A-lister, what is wrong with that. Try, for example, to get the mass media pundits like David Brooks or Paul Krugman to listen to you.
Finally, most of what I know about weblogs I read at weblogs or at sources bloggers pointed me to. Blogs really are the only place where the information is. And in my case it started with Griff Wigley, who posted above.
So Griff gives me the idea, then I start to visit other blog sites. Over the weeks I collect more information at more weblogs. Finally, I collect enough information that I feel confident to write an op-ed piece that is circulated to 400,000 plus people.
That piece was "influenced" by all the blogs I have read over the last few months. Collectively bloggers have power, they have influence.
There is a fascinating paper that might add some useful views to this debate, called "Googlearchy: How a Few Heavily-Linked Sites Dominate Politics on the Web" (http://www.princeton.edu/~mhindman/googlearchy--hindman.pdf). I'm not an academic, and don't know the literature around this topic, so if someone else has read it and has any more context to add to it, I'd be interested.
A central point, though, appears to be that web sites of political groups seem to have the same type of visibility characteristics as other categories of web sites - that is, that a few big, well-known sites are visited and referred to, and most others are seldom seen. The implications of this are that the common view of the web as a great leveler by providing an outlet for the individual voice doesn't mean much, since people will still largely see and read only a few large voices. Of course, they present the data they have to back up that claim.
A few interesting quotes:
This research seems to support Simon Finkelstein's argument that individual, non-A-list political bloggers are pissing in the wind, as far as the influence they have. However, I am one who wants to believe that even if these sites are not changing the power structure yet, they are showing us some different possibilities for the utility of the web that nobody necessarily set out to create, and whose final shape we have yet to see. The paper, though, gives some evidence of what they are up against.
p.s. I found this link originally by pure chance at http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/, a techie's personal blog and not what I would think of as a citizen blogger.
Is there any research into how often and in what manner blogger's blogging habits change? I think I've always been a commentator, but I know a few people who have transitioned from diarist to commentator. Perhaps on a long enough timeline, the diarists become reporters.
I agree with Jeff Jarvis that "citizen blogger" is redundant (there are a lot of alien bloggers?). What you and Dave are saying, I think, is that bloggers are at the leading edge of a phenomenon called participatory media -- but you'll have to share the stage with amateur journalists, amateur filmmakers, amateur political ad makers, and many more.
[This is posted much later because I happened to notice that a comment of mine is gone. I don't think it's malicious. Rather, I believe there is/was a bug in the antispam deletions. You can tell I must have posted it correctly, because the comment gets quoted in part by someone else later down the discussion, the one beginning: "Dave, the mathematics exists independent of me." (#008469)]
Dave, the mathematics exists independent of me. If you must get personal about it, consider that as an EFF Pioneer Award winner, and also as someone who won a DMCA exemption, I just might, I tell you, just might, have something to say, some insight, which is worth listening to.
The distinction between 1) diaryist 2) commentator 3) reporter , is well worth making, and I've talked about it before. So if you're saying that many critiques of blogging unfairly dismiss *everything* as diary-writing (the "teenage girls" point), yet it can be punditry and journalism too, that's great, as far as it goes.
But there are severe constraints on *any* sort of civic volunteerism. In fact, quite possibly the eventual outcome will be the exact opposite that you want, allowing BigCo's to squeeze out the little guy from the standpoint of influence.
It is *great* to have a value that "an individual taking an interest in his or her citizenship, is a good thing, an American thing, a First Amendment thing". Yay! Other good things in general are feeding the hungry, ministering to the sick, teaching the young, and so on. I share all of these values. But achieving them is another matter.
It's laudable for you to support civic volunteerism. Just don't confuse the power you transfer as an A-lister, with the influence of the volunteer!