Open Editing
Micah Sifry
has a great insight
over at Iraq War Reader:
Bloggers are editors, not journalists. We bloggers are not
reporting what we see, we're editing what others tell us.
In my humble opinion, bloggers who write about current events and culture
(as opposed to people who are mainly focused on their inner world or their
personal spheres) aren't getting attention and adding value to the democratic
discourse so much because they're behaving like journalists, it's because
they're behaving like editors. Not that many bloggers are generating fresh
reporting on events, as journalists or reporters covering a news story would
do. (Not that I'm against bloggers being reporters, or bloggers correcting
bad reporting by unearthing contradictory information.) But what many good
bloggers are doing is filtering the news for us, the way a good editor does.
I was talking this over with my editor at John Wiley & Sons, Eric
Nelson, and I think he hit the nail on the head. He writes, "Most blogs
sort through the vast array of media, telling readers what's important to
know today. Like a editorial page or opinion magazine editor, they provide
short 'house' opinions on major topics, but they mostly point the reader in
the direction of several other experts, noting that these articles, wire reports,
or opinion pieces are the current must-reads--and more importantly, trustworthy."
In a word, what editors bring to the table is their sensibility. Of course,
not all of the articles or news stories they select for our attention are
picked because they are trustworthy. Sometimes, quite the opposite. But a
good editor then tells us why that's the case.
Micah drives to the hole and dunks it! This is precisely the insight that's
been missing from the media vs. bloggers dialogue. Micah goes on to imply that
our new collective cultural editing is the global equivalent of the blind committee
examining the elephant.
...the alchemy of the blogosphere--where we each read or hear about a
few things and blog them, and some of us read several other bloggers and reinforce
their choices with our own echoes or dissents--produces a pretty good zeitgeist
watch. (Insert shameless plug for Technorati here.)
Blogging, then, is the equivalent of a police sketch artist. Even if each
of us is handicapped and specialized, the sketch artist makes our collective
effort holistic and insightful. (Extending the metaphor to demonstrate the Sifry
brothers' plot to dominate blogspace, Technorati
is the artist's indispensable index.)
...We're all sniffing at the zeitgeist and trying to figure out which
way things are headed. And partially because it's become so easy to do, and
because the people we had entrusted to do this for us haven't been doing much
of a job of this on their own, we're doing it ourselves.
The Metaphor, Please
Open source mavens and groupies will quickly see the tight parallel between
bloggers' collective discernment with the open source development process, where
"many eyes make all bugs shallow":
The other space that bloggers are filling is in the department of truth-telling,
or at least truth-claiming. Back to my wise man Eric. He says:
"Newspapers have abdicated their duties in getting to the "truth"
of a story. [I'd add TV even more so.] Instead, in the name of objectivity,
they simply report the he-said, she-said on how much some new initiative
will cost, as if there were no way to empirically determine the answer.
Bloggers rarely link to this kind of story. The most widely-read ones seek
out some piece of writing on the web where a person has actually determined
the real answer, or gotten an on the record quote, or put forth a question
no one else has asked, and then they link to it, saying, in effect, 'If
you believe me, then you can believe this.' "
We bloggers are more than zeitgeist gazers. I believe we're engaged in a collective
design process by which human values are beginning to supersede corporate valuelessness,
correcting an unintended outcome whereby ink-by-the-barrel was affordable only
to the big pubs. The values–and outrage–that inform our posts are
those of ethical individuals, reacting to the tapestry of inert sensibilities
woven by Big Media.
Carbon-based persons hold strong beliefs, which they feel are self-evident.
This is not true of charter-based persons–corporations–which, in
their ceaselessly failing Turing
Test, cannot bring themselves to speak in a human voice expressing human
values.
What are we designing? I think it's a society with a memory. Big media's not
much interested in the historical arc describing how we got here. Part of it
may be the low level of cultural awareness of most reporters and certainly of
the talking heads. Amateur writers though, working literally for the love of
editing out the errors so obvious to them, instantiate thoughts and point to
evidence that, once documented, is harder to ignore than yesterday's newsprint
recycled as today's fish wrap.
Consideration of prior art was once a requirement for serious commentary, where
each work presuming to be consequential felt considered the thread that preceded
it. Arbitrary, ungrounded declarations were dismissed as a form of daydreaming,
not as serious work. This requirement lives on in science and, happily, in computer
programming and the welcome tyranny of standards-based engineering. Prior art
has been abandoned by marketers huckstering old wine in new bottles and describing
the trivial as startling. When news became marketing, those tricks were adopted.
When marketing took over politics, appearances trumped statecraft.
Can We Go Home Again?
If we're lucky, attribution-based blogging will lead our cultural dialogue
back to the reflective candor that was natural when everyone in the clan or
village witnessed the same truths and were constrained by their shared history.
3:04:40 PM 
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