{"id":1419,"date":"2003-09-12T14:26:00","date_gmt":"2003-09-12T18:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/dbnews\/2003\/09\/12\/approaching-critical-mass\/"},"modified":"2003-09-12T14:26:00","modified_gmt":"2003-09-12T18:26:00","slug":"approaching-critical-mass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/2003\/09\/12\/approaching-critical-mass\/","title":{"rendered":"Approaching Critical Mass"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Soon after I started blogging this year, I had the good fortune to be taken
\n in by the group of bloggers at Harvard’s
\n Berkman Center<\/a> under the visionary
\n leadership of Dave Winer<\/a>. I got the impression very early that Dave seemed
\n to be working towards a world in which EVERYBODY had a blog. Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration (sorry Dave),
\n but I got the definite impression that he was on a crusade to get as many
\n people as possible to start their own blogs.<\/p>\n

At first I didn’t really understand why. I had read quite a few blogs in preparation
\n for starting Dowbrigade, and quite frankly, most of them seemed not worth the
\n time. Should we not, I wondered, push for quality rather than quantity, and
\n try to teach people to write better and more interesting blogs? What was the
\n sense in creating more blogs just to have more blogs, if they were all saying
\n more or less the same thing?<\/p>\n

Slowly, over the past few months, my whole perception of the blogging phenomena
\n has undergone a paradigm shift. I now see that blogs are part of an authentic
\n revolution in information distribution and represent a new way in which the
\n web is organizing itself to facilitate contact between real people in the real
\n world. As part of series of revolutionary updates in information distribution
\n beginning with the printing
\n press<\/a>, when blogs are adopted by a sufficiently
\n large number of people they will achieve critical mass and set off profound
\n and far-reaching changes in our society, politics, and the direction in which
\n the global information infrastructure is evolving.<\/p>\n

As mentioned in an
\n earlier essay<\/a>, the main advantage of the blogosphere as an
\n alternative to the Major Mass Media is its ubiquity, its ability to be on the
\n scene instantly, to know the principals and the principles involved in a story
\n first-hand. One of its main
\n vulnerabilities<\/a> is the ability of the entrenched
\n power structure to apply pressure or even shut off any individual blogger or
\n group which threatens its primacy. Both of these issues could reach a tippling
\n point in favor of the new media when the sheer number of blogs reaches critical
\n mass.<\/p>\n

For the Blogosphere Brain to act as a viable alternative to the existing Mass
\n Media Mind, it needs innumerable cells in every corner of the globe, and in
\n every niche of human expertise. Would the developed world’s ignorance of the
\n million-man massacres going on right now in the Congo continue if there were
\n a blogger in every village in Central Africa? Would our understanding of the terrible
\n dynamics of the Columbine school shootings not have been enhanced if a few
\n fifteen and sixteen year old sophomores and juniors at Columbine High School
\n had been bloggers, and had known the shooters and victims personally? When the number
\n of blogs hits critical mass the question will become, How can CNN, with their
\n 47 bureaus in major world capitals, compete with the Blogosphere, with 50 MILLION
\n bureaus in every backwater, two-bit crossroads on the planet?<\/p>\n

As to the questions raised in my paranoid ramblings (The
\n Darker Side of Blogging)<\/a>,
\n eventually the sheer number of bloggers, the very redundancy which made me
\n question the wisdom of merely multiplying the number of bloggersin the first
\n place, can protect them from outside pressure. Sure, the government could probably
\n shut down
\n any
\n individual
\n blog, or server, or
\n even
\n ISP. But when there are a hundred or a thousand bloggers ready to step into
\n the gap in the chain, and tens of thousands of copies of every posting circulating
\n in the internet bloodstream, there will be no way to control or contain it.
\n Massively parallel blogging will overcome any attempts to stem the tide.<\/p>\n

When will critical mass be achieved? Is it even inevitable that it will, at
\n this stage of the game. Dave<\/a> says he half expects the storm troopers to march
\n down Mass Ave and put the kibosh on BloggerCon<\/a>. I tend to think that the die
\n is cast, and its too late to stop it now. Trying to stop the blog revolution
\n would be like the Pope declaring the printing press illegal in 15th century
\n Europe because it was a threat to the jobs of illuminated manuscriptors.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, I believe that when Critical Mass is achieved, it will set off
\n a series of changes that we cannot even begin to imagine or predict. Personally,
\n I hope they include the chance to wrest away control of the global stream of
\n consciousness from the cabal of suits who currently direct it hither and thither
\n from glass and steel palaces in New York and LA. And at the risk of sounding
\n like a sci-fi wacko, in my heart of hearts, I suspect that if allowed to develop
\n sufficient cells and synapses, the world-wide blogosphere and the infrastructure
\nthat underlies it may evolve a completely new kind of collective consciousness.<\/p>\n

Note: This is the last in a series on the future of blogging which began
\n with<\/p>\n

Can Truth Trump the Big Lie<\/a>
\nand continued with
\nThe Darker Side of Blogging<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Soon after I started blogging this year, I had the good fortune to be taken in by the group of bloggers at Harvard’s Berkman Center under the visionary leadership of Dave Winer. I got the impression very early that Dave … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":299,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1444],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-screeds"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/299"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1419\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}