Posted on July 16, 2005, 6:21 am
by doug freeman
Tom,
If I were in the desired future appreciating where we were and wanting to understand how we got there I'd ask a couple questions like.....
"What finally stimulated the mass exodus away from old style journalism and into blogging as a primaary news source for much of the world's population?"
"How were the imaginations of a critical mass of people stimulated by blog culture?"
"How did blogs become hip to the mainstream culture?"
It's not too outlandish to suggest that blogs are in their infancy now and might be expected to become as commonly used as the internet and cellphones. It's more a matter of "when" not "if". Isn't what we're talking about really the question of how to ingage the curiosity and interest of the public in this technology sooner rather than later?
What would it look like to facilitate a collectively intelligent approach to promote blogging as an alternative to contemporary media coverage? Using Tom's model of collectively intelligent interventions, what are the most effective levels to be activated in service of a cultural shift away from reliance on contemporary media and into blog rendered information transfer?
Y'all with me on this?
Don't you think a well conceptualized, concrete and well presented plan would attract adequate funding? Do we really suppose in the circle of friends and associates familiar with this work there aren't organizations and individuals of wealth eager and hungry to be asked to fund a specific and clearly defined project of this type?
Doug Freeman
Posted on July 16, 2005, 3:59 pm
by Tom Atlee
Thanks, Doug. I think such a project would be great, but wouldn't be my focus, personally. I'm interested in building the deliberative capacity of the citizenry. Blogging offers an alternative source of information, but has its own problems re identifying what's dependable. If someone wants to improve the role of blogging in society's collective intelligence, I'd suggest developing more sophisticated ways to evaluate bloggers' info.
As I said in my May 1 entry "Citizen Journalism vs Framing Issues for Deliberation" my interest in blogs is how they provide raw material for framing issues for deliberation (i.e., describing the range of approaches to an issue and the arguments and evidence for and against each approach). I'm not sure if bloggers, themselves, as a group, are the right ones to process that information. But I'd be interested in anyone's ideas for a highly participatory online system for evaluating and sorting "open source information" (including all the blog data) into knowledge usable for public deliberations.
