Joho the Blog
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September 18, 2006
For the past couple of weeks, I've done little except revise my book. All day, every day. Well, I've had a couple of events I'd committed to, including a keynote at the Scottish Learning Festival that I leave for tonight—I was supposed to be done with my revising by now—but basically I've been head-down in my book. Which means I haven't had time to read other people's blogs. The blogosphere and its local eddies are often thought of as bubbles, little hermetic worlds unaware that there's a bigger world with bigger ideas beyond them. But not reading blogs now feels to me like being in a bubble. I'm cut off. I don't know what's going on, what people are talking about, who's on a high, who's on a roll, who's just keeping on. The truth is that we humans always live in bubbles. While our ideas and ideals may strive for the universal, we are embodied locally. So, living in a bubble isn't an objection; it is our condition. The question is whether we seek to expand our ideas and—more important—our sympathy or we think our local bubble is the one that's figured it all out (as per Mel Brooks' immortal caveman anthem: "Let 'em all go to Hell, except Cave Seven"). Even the best intentioned of us still live locally—damn bodies!—so we're talking here about trying, about a dialectic, about a failed awareness. But, that failure keeps our bubbles honest. I look forward to breaking out of my bubble of self-involvement pretty soon now. I hear it's been a mild September. [Tags: bubble blogosphere mel_brooks] Posted
by D. Weinberger at September 18, 2006 10:03 AM
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Comments
We're looking forward to seeing you in Scotland - there's a very healthy and rapidly growing community of new teaching teachers who have been waiting far too long for a keynote to come and express what it really means to live in today's world.
We hope you can join our bubble for a glass of wine at the end of Wednesday, too ;-)
Posted by: Ewan McIntosh | September 18, 2006 10:25 AM
I believe the experts call it "bounded rationality"....
Posted by: antonis hontzeas | September 18, 2006 11:01 AM
I think the blogosphere of bubbles critique make a lot of sense when directed towards the individuals who say they (uniquely) "know what's going on. . ." because they read blogs.
You say, of your not reading blogs: "I don't know what's going on, what people are talking about, who's on a high, who's on a roll, who's just keeping on."
And, one might interpret that to mean that you would say that you really DO "know what's going on . . ." when you are reading blogs.
(I don't interpret it that way--guessing from your post, I interpret it more like you are coming up for air after being heads down at work for a while. I mean, your post makes it almost sound like you have had zero contact with other humans and our doings, since you stopped reading blogs!)
But, someone who reads 500 blogs is only following 0.001% of what's going on in the so-called blogosphere. (That's using Technorati's 50 million blogs number--which, I think, doesn't count the other tens of millions of posting-places used by people for blogging, e.g., via MySpace, Flickr, etc.)
Anyway, I think there's been some hubris among some bloggers who see themselves as having the pulse of what's going on in some larger sense--and who, in my experience, are actually pretty isolated from things outside of their own clique.
That said, being on the web, in general, I think gives one access to a lot more points of view and a lot more information about what's going on. Personally, right now, I feel like I am getting more out of discussion boards and IM than out of blogs, but that's barely relevant--what's great is that one can communicate with other people all over the world using the Internet.
Posted by: Jay Fienberg | September 18, 2006 04:05 PM