Stirling Newberry explains why we feel so blessed in this blogosphere. He knows the variety of voices and the dynamism of the space. He is himself part of the rebirth of remarkably clean, free and forceful politics online. And he knows how apt is the spherical image of this new linked, 
democratic, planetary zone we’re in.
The model of politics and culture is shifting, he observes, from the pyramid to the sphere. In conversation he trumped my reference to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Circles” as a sort of key to the Internet transformation. “The eye is the first circle,” Emerson wrote in 1841. “The horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary picture is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.”
Stirling Newberry had Emerson’s next line by heart, it turned out: “St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere… ” In his own voice he continued: “That’s the image you should have of what’s happening on the Internet. Anyone on any given day can be the center if he has the best observation that resonates. There is no boundary of the circle… You get to sing a song and listen to the echo. You get to hear… how other people have taken what you’ve done and turned it into their center.”
Stirling Newberry spins a common man’s context of history and theory in the second half of our conversation. The spirit of blogging comes out of the “open source” software movement–itself an echo of Gutenberg’s press and the Protestant Reformation. The big blog surge of 2003, in this reckoning, comes out of the shocks of the Internet bubble and crash, September 11, the Iraq War and the realization that “people no longer trusted the Establishment media to tell them the truth.” It is Dr. Jonathan Shay’s point (in Achilles in Vietnam and Odysseus in America) that, as Stirling Newberry paraphrases him, “the most 
important thing for coming to terms with a traumatic event is having a community of people with whom you feel a deep connection, people who understand what you mean with a word or phrase.” That “richness of contextualized information” is what the Internet provides, he says. At the onset of the 2004 presidential campaign, blogs have become the place where anger finds coherence, where multitudes beating the bushes learn to chop at the root of their frustration. Blogs are the free marketplace of ideas, the place where community generates force. Looking for someone to turn Kool Aid into champagne? Stirling Newberry could be your man. Listen in.
{ 21 } Comments
St. Augustine or Pascal?
The old Connections forums format or your own christopherlydon.org forums format is much, much more likely to generate “the free marketplace of ideas, the place where community generates force” than a blog.
In either case – whether blog or forums – there needs to be some potent seed that draws people to the virtual space in order for a dynamic community to arise.
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St. Augustine?
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Post interesting. Especially in his time.
The model of politics and culture is shifting, he observes, from the pyramid to the sphere. In conversation he trumped my reference to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Circles” as a sort of key to the Internet transformation. “The eye is the first circle,” Emerson wrote in 1841. ”The horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary picture is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.”
The pyramids were not built by aliens.
Whoever built the pyramids were very sharp minds or merely had pointed heads.
What does the pyramid mean on the dollar bill?
What’s the attractions to these monuments-so many people died for the egos of supercilious kings.
I agree that…Blogs are the free marketplace of ideas
You’ve never interviewed one boring person, have you? Wonderful stuff! My MP3 player is full of your audio.
Hey thats a good picture. I would love to visit and see that.