Approaching Critical Mass

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 seemed
to be working towards a world in which EVERYBODY had a blog. Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration (sorry Dave),
but I got the definite impression that he was on a crusade to get as many
people as possible to start their own blogs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note: This is the last in a series on the future of blogging which began
with

Can Truth Trump the Big Lie
and continued with
The Darker Side of Blogging