The Blog Commons: What is Uncommon?

Seth Godin has stirred up a tempest in a teapot with his recent The noisy tragedy of the blog commons, the newest go-round in the metaphor wars around blogging:

Without friction, without a gate on the clutter, we clearly face a commons problem. Here, though, instead of people taking too much of a shared physical good because they have nothing to lose, the problem is surplus. By writing too much, too often, we're trouncing on the attention of the commons.

This is yet another riff on the 'scarce attention' meme: there is too much 'content' being produced, people have too little time to devote, how do we know what is worth reading, what 'filters' are we supposed to use to pick out the wheat from the chaff or the signal from the noise, and so on.

Not that I dispute some of the issues involved. But it proceeds from an pseudo economic footing that is going almost unchallenged. It has become the conventional wisdom to reel off those sorts of pronouncements in conference halls and hallways, and lament the loss of... what, exactly? A halcyon era when the front page of the regional paper and the news anchors on the three major channels fed us their take on the news? A simpler, more bucolic blogosphere a few years back when only a few hundred people were posting?

The ascendancy of this metaphor is troubling. It's akin to the 1950s acceptance of Freudian psychological models -- which satisfied some deep need for society, but which are inherent wrong and unproven empirically. Why did we need to believe in the unconscious self, or the deep drives of the id? Who knows. Similarly, this economic model of a transactional information flow has taken root in the popular mind, and we may have to wait generations for it to fade.

Umair Haque chimes in (none too clearly, but on target):

[from Usefulness and The Banality of Business]

For the same reason that Seth thinks we're littering an attention "commons" when we blog - we've been fooled by thinking too narrowly, because the language of the market and the concepts of economics, used without care, limit our vision: we've been fooled by economics.

I maintain a human-centric, psychological model of involvement in the world. People have a boundless interest in those that they think worthy of their attention. Yes, there are only so many minutes in a day, but that hasn't changed recently. The concept that the 'pace' of life is 'faster' is a metaphor. Many people in America, despite stating that they are incredibly busy, too busy for involvement in social activities, for example, still manage to spend three or four hours a day watching television, which they justify as 'relaxation' or 'education'. I can't imagine how watching cars driving around a track is either, and likewise I am baffled by people's explanations that while they don't like TV in general, this particular show -- the one they watch -- is different from the rest, and so on.

People are making choices about the media they want to use to understand the world, and define themselves through. Their perceptions of what they are actually doing and why may be practical -- "I read the local paper because I am interested in the local music scene" -- or totally fantastic -- "MySpace is where all the coolest people are." People's approach to reading blogs is equally all-over-the-place. Scoble's consumption of 1000's of bloggers output everyday is the equivalent of an eating contest, not a serious recommendation for a the average diet. The rise of RSS readers has led a lot of people down a psychologial cul-de-sac that will only end in exactly the sorts of pronouncements that Godin is making: the sky is falling, the sky is falling, because individuals can only absorb the insights of a relatively modest number of people.

The Dunbar constant is the notion that human beings can only have significant involvement with approximately 150 known individuals. Named after the anhtropologist Robin Dunbar, the notion is well-supported by decades of research and analysis.

I maintain that the feeding frenzy around RSS engorgement is beginning to wear off, and people will have to return to a more natural, hunter-gatherer approach to blog exploration. Read people you like, people you'd like to be trapped on an island with, and follow their links. As you wander around, some old friends fall off your list, some new folks become buddies. Track new memes that take hold in your Dunbar neighborhood, follow them to their sources as journeys of discovery. Visualize yourself as an explorer, not as a cog in some giant economic machine. Live life mythically, not prosaically. You are searching for insight, not balancing your checkbook.

And in the final analysis what is uncommon is the issue. It is rare to find true voice: people whose expression of their thoughts captivates, makes us larger by shared insight and the resonance of strong ideas, authority based on more than tight reasoning and clear grammar, but a deep understanding of our relationship to ideas and their application to make things better. How can there ever be too much of that?

Comments

[John Cass]

Stowe, I am with you on this one, not Seth Godin. I know I was not able to keep up with the volume of traditional media content never mind blogging content. It's a matter of design and desire to me. RSS feed readers do give people the ability to review more content easily, however after a point even that new device becomes overwhelmed due to lack of time. I think a happy medium will develop for people, if you cannot cope with the volume of RSS feeds, unsubscribe or hire someone to help.

[rob earl]

Fortunately, we humans are selective creatures. It's hard-wired in us. So while there may be gazillions of bloggers blogging every minute ... so what? There are thousands of newspapers, books and magazines published every day but we may read only one. There are billions of conversations underway at any single moment but we are involved in, what, one? We're exposed to thousands of advertising messages daily but we've all gotten pretty damn good at tuning out virtually all of them. Hey, Seth, we'll manage just fine ... zeroing in on whatever we find that affects us, connects with us, appeals to us most. No need to get all worked up about a cacaphony of anything. Please, spare the gatekeepers. We're designed to deal with this sort of thing and we're good at it.

[Stowe Boyd]

I agree with your both, John and Rob.

[bg]

“It is rare to find true voice: people whose expression of their thoughts captivates, makes us larger by shared insight and the resonance of strong ideas, authority based on more than tight reasoning and clear grammar, but a deep understanding of our relationship to ideas and their application to make things better. How can there ever be too much of that?”

Absolutely spot on.

Blogging, twittering, and all of it is still about a person expressing themselves. Some write to an audience, others for themselves. Both are valid though.

And if what you write connects with a few more people than say, the blog next door, so be it. Maybe one adds a few more popular tags here and there, but that shouldn't really change why you write however.

So a blog falls out of the top whatever list currently popular. I could name 100 popular blogs that I will never read because they’re just not my cup of tea.

I could name 10 though with little or no exposure that are so well-written they make me want to quit blogging.

Popular, not popular. A blog with a voice will still be out there for someone to connect with.