The Dawn of a New Era of Scholarship

Not long ago, I toyed with a theory that I'd like to take the time to further develop.

A common thread that I have observed, among the critics of blogging as well as those who despair of it after experiencing a long period of writer's block, is that it tends to be judged as one would judge a news medium. For the critics in particular, it seems little more than a soapbox to rant from on a regular basis. For the disenchanted, they feel that if they are not updating regularly, they have in some way failed.

These are valid concerns if you are talking about a newspaper. If it only gives you the opinion of a single individual, and doesn't even keep up with current events consistently, what's the point? However, it underestimates the differences in the mediums. A newspaper needs readers in order to prosper. All a blog needs is for a person to want to have it.

Mister Snitch wrote by far the greatest post I have ever read on the different styles of blogging, and I won't dwell on the many reasons that a person might want to have a blog. Instead, I would like to discuss one of my own reasons for continuing to use Sophistpundit even after long period of low productivity.

I believe that blogs contribute something valuable beyond simply what it is that they have written most recently. With the continued application of the Google Algorithm, those web pages that have been clicked on by the most people making similar searches, or linked to by the most other websites, will be the top search results. In other words, those pages that are found to be the most useful by the most people where a specific subject is concerned over the longest period of time will become standard points of reference for a great deal of interested parties.

This is why I believe that blogging can be used as a tool to enrich our intellectual environment. If you don't particularly care about traffic, but believe very strongly that the search for the truth is important, a blog is a fantastic tool to that end. You can take the information you're using, provide your analysis of it, cite or link to your sources, and plug out a post. If it's lousy, it's lousy. You've probably learned something by writing it.

On top of that, your post has entered into a competition among untold legions of other posts for the top ranking in a Google Search. In April of 2006, Technorati estimated that 1.2 million new posts were being published every day. I have yet to find an estimate on what the total number of posts ever made might be, but it doesn't take much imagination to guess that it's probably somewhere in the billions. Over time, all of these posts accumulate value--either by being linked to directly, by being on a blog that accumulates more links itself, or by being selected by search engine browsers. The greater the value that the post manages to scrape together, the higher its ranking on Google searches.

If you feel that you have something to contribute on a subject, however small, then publishing from a blog is a perfectly legitimate means by which to make that contribution. You cannot control how it will be received any more than you could control whether or not an article will be accepted or rejected by a magazine. Unlike the case of the magazine, however, you post will always be there--accumulating even the tiniest shreds of value over time.

There has been a tendency to view the world of blogging with a certain cynicism. I think that Wikipedia best describes the idea of the "daily me" in the following paragraph:

The term has also been associated with the phenomenon of individuals customising and personalising their news feeds, resulting in their being exposed only to content they are already inclined to agree with. The daily me can thus be a critical component of the "Echo Chamber" effect, defined in an article in Salon by David Weinberger as "those Internet spaces where like-minded people listen only to those people who already agree with them."

It has been argued, along these lines, that the decline of the mass media outlets is the result of the "daily me" effect; people breaking away from the unified medium in order to isolate themselves from everything that they find unpleasant. As the article suggests, this view is essentially stating that a predominant feature of internet culture is the birth of endless echo chambers.

I vehemently disagree. In blogging particularly, and the internet more broadly, I see the opportunity to create an ever growing wealth of points of reference. What Google has done is given us a method of ranking the pages that provide these points. It is what I would consider the closest thing to a real meritocracy that you could ask for when organizing such a vast amount of information. It is as though they have provided scientists with a method of immediately finding the articles within their field which have been cited by the most other articles.

For this reason I see blogging as an opportunity; to take part in a new era of scholarship and learning. For myself, it isn't about updating the most frequently, or having the most traffic. It's about making my modest contributions to a much larger storehouse of information, and learning a great deal along the way.