(Note: I realized after writing this whole post that I began referring to Web 2.0 in the past tense. Hmm.)
Phone Boy has a snappy post up today. He’s appreciating Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 while simultaneously blasting the same-old-same-old intellectual currents of the blogosphere. While I’ve never read 451, I do agree with Phone Boy that the amount of original thought coming out of the blogosphere has diminished considerably. It seems that this has occurred mostly since more people started blogging regularly. Professional blogs, amateur blogs, good blogs and shitty ones. From Engadget all the way down to the proverbial full-time mom earning income at home for three bucks a post, the blogosphere, and the Web 2.0 world at large, is filled with increasingly irrelevant voices.
And why are they irrelevant? Because they’re all saying the same stuff.
At its start, Web 2.0 was uniquely set apart from Web 1.0 because it neither sold the user anything (ie. Amazon 1.0) nor tried to replace an offline product (ie. NYTimes.com 1.0). No, Web 2.0 was mostly about using the collective of individual user opinion to democratize good ideas, and perhaps even to monetize those good ideas. Often, those good ideas were just blog posts with fresh philosophy or some tidbit of revelation about technology or science. Sadly, Web 2.0 moved away from that whole idea, and it’s devolved into a sort of commentary on the technology industry where every author claims to be an industry insider. I liken it to a guy who plays great poker quitting in order to write about other poker players because it’s easier to write about them than to play against them, ie. easier to write than to THINK.
If the blog aggregators have told us one thing, it’s that we, as self-proclaimed industry insiders, mostly think alike. Is there a fear of public scrutiny that keeps us from blasting each other on our blogs? Or is it simply bad form to have a public debate any more? I don’t seem to have a problem with taking people to task publicly. Maybe that’s because I don’t have a problem being taken to task myself. In fact, I do it so much that I’ve been called a grump, picky, hypersensitve, overly critical, you name it.
Don’t care.
I appreciate those who adequately express their own isolated opinions, rather than piling on the prevailing dogma of the blogosphere at any given moment, blowing the wind of whatever current Online Weather System is buzzing through. Honest, concrete expression of unique ideas is what’s missing from these buzz machines. A prevailing concept blows through the blogosphere and gets just beaten absolutely to death by the Agreement Monster.
Critical thinking goes out the window and you get a chorus of two hundred 22-year-old part-time bloggers saying Cloud Computing is to file servers what file servers were to mainframes, each unaware, at first, that his contemporaries are all reporting the same “news” as gospel. By the time you’re done reading Techmeme’s top post on any given day, you’ve probably consumed 15 posts that agree whole-heartedly, 5 posts that have a keyword match on a tag but are either unrelated or one paragraph in length, and 1 or 2 posts of dissenting opinion.
In questioning the easy-to-hold points of view, I often sacrifice traffic. And that’s OK, because at least I’m telling the truth. I don’t usually post about something unless I’m passionate about it, compelled to write about it, because frankly, there are better ways to spend my time–helping clients, helping my kids with their homework, etc.–than writing my umpteenth Thesis of Ultimate Agreement with Blogger X or Blogger Y. OK, if I agree with you, you’re less likely to hear from me on my blog.
That’s OK, there are thousands of others who agree with you. And you’ll hear from them. Because they want the traffic from blogs.com and Techmeme. But how many times do you really need to read the same opinion?
