Consider two recent postings on the state of Web 2.0 discourse.
The first, optimistic one comes from Tyler Cowen on the utility of the blogosphere:
Chess players who train with computers are much stronger for it. They test their intuitions and receive rapid feedback as to what works, simply by running their program. People who learn economics through the blogosphere also receive feedback, especially if they sample dialogue across a number of blogs of differing perspectives. The feedback comes from which arguments other people found convincing....
Not many outsiders understand what a powerful learning mechanism the blogosphere has set in place.
Now let's consider FP's own Evgeny Morozov's revulsion response to the twittering about balloon boy yesterday:
The amount of energy that had been exerted by the Twitterati to save the now infamous "balloon boy" would probably be enough to prevent at least a few dozen African genocides. They even started their own campaign with its own hashtag: #savetheballoonboy, which for a while was a trending topic on Twitter. That is, it was a trending topic before it turned out that the boy was hiding in his house and had not had any relationship with that balloon....
[T]his all-pervasive cynicism with which members of the slacktivist generation treat extremely serious social problems is very off-putting and disturbing. What was the reaction to the #ballonboy story after the boy's whereabouts were disclosed? Humor. Some of it the jokes were mildly funny; most of it them were in bad taste. For example, the most popular joke - which also became a trending topic on Twitter - was making fun of Anne Frank, of all people (implying that she had a much better hide-out space in the attic - all phrased to sound as it was coming from Kanye West).
Well, if a tasteless joke about one of the most dramatic symbols of the Holocaust becomes the most popular topic on Twitter, there is something fundamentally wrong with the taste and norms of that community.
So, blogs are better than Twitter, yes? Um, no.
The blogosphere can be a powerful learning mechanism -- but that hardly guarantees that it will be. In this way, the blogosphere -- and the Twitterverse, for that matter -- are simply alternative mediums, like television or radio. The content, or the consumption of that content, can be either good or bad. To use a famous constructivist turn of phrase, the blogosphere is what people make of it.
Tyler Cowen's blogosphere? I want to go to there. But I'm not sure everyone else does. And, just because a lot of people want to go to Morozov's dystopic depiction of the Twitterverse doesn't mean that everyone will.
Blogs have been around for a decade now, and Twitter has been in operation for a few years. Can we dispense with the broad-based characterizations of social systems that are way too variegated for such simple characterizations?
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