Blogging's Proliferaton of Opinion

While his tips on how to be a good blogger seem rather patronizing to me, Brendan O'Neill had some interesting comments on the blogging phenomenon in this post:

Many in the Blogosphere claim they are doing something new and distinctive in modern journalism. In fact, blogging is the logical conclusion of some of the worst trends in modern journalism. Today, much of the media is taken up by opinion, subjective rants, voxpops and, lest we forget, 'the view from the man in the street'.

Just about every newspaper, radio show and TV programme courts 'the people's opinion' these days, to balance our 'ordinary views' against the views of experts, politicians and seasoned journalists. This indulgence of everyman's opinions usually ends up patronising the public, rather than really engaging us. As British journalist Ed Barrett recently argued:

'[People] are entitled to their "bog standard opinions". But most of us get more than enough of that sort of thing already in our day-to-day lives, without hearing it on radio and TV as well. Is it unreasonable to ask for a few talking heads that don't appear to have had frontal lobotomy? Experts may not be perfect - but faced with the alternative I'll take an expert every time.'

The Blogosphere takes the idea that every opinion is valid and worth hearing to new heights, turning it into an art form. Anyone who's no-one can set up a weblog and spout forth their mundane views. As a result, much of today's traditional media and new online media are full of often vulgar and inarticulate opinions, in the pretence that such unmediated views reveal some kind of truth that expert investigation overlooks. Nonsense. It is more like listening to a drunken conversation than taking part in a serious debate.

The Blogosphere is built on opinion. But what is so great about having an opinion? As Clint Eastwood once said, 'Opinions are like arseholes - everybody's got one'. And like arseholes, we don't need to see (or indeed hear) them every minute of the day.

Opinions are ten-a-penny, and are usually little more than prejudice anyway. Research, argument and hard graft, however, can sometimes turn petty opinion into considered judgement - but research, argument and hard graft are notable by their absence in the Blogosphere.

This is an important consideration. With everyone from Peggy Noonan to Andrew Sullivan lauding blogging with descriptions of a "revolution" or "technological reformation," perhaps some humility should be in order. According to O'Neill's logic (which I am sympathetic towards), the proliferation of opinion - especially militant, self righteous opinions which leave little room for dialogue - means the blogosphere runs the risk of being filled with propaganda and disinformation. The implication is that, in the end, discourse will suffer, no matter how much democratization is instilled by the destruction of publishing barriers.

For some context, recall that there was a similar concern when the printing press began to flourish in the 17th and 18th centuries. Back then, many were worried about the loss of "credibility" in the printed word, precisely because printing and textual dispersal could be accomplished outside the traditional, centralized beauracracies of that time. In Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution, Michael Hobart and Zachary Schiffman suggest that the "avalanche of books and ideas [from the printing revolution] engendered not intellectual advancement but confusion, undercutting the traditional, classificatory means of information management" as "the newfound ease of accessing and using them engendered information overload." This fear of confusion lead Francis Bacon, of all people, to propose that “all practitioners [of print] must be licensed by court officers, resolution of arguments must be centralized and decisive, word of the debates must be restricted to the central legislators, and there must be no publication to the populace without central approval.”

Another response was to develop new approaches to information management, largely with the explosion of science and mathematics. "Doubts about the ability to know the order of the world catalyzed a crucial change, away from taxonomic forms of information storage based on natural language and towards new ones based on a symbolic language of analytical abstraction," claim Hobart and Schiffman.

Is another "crucial change" in the way humans organize and relate to information on the horizon? What about Bacon's recommendation? We've already begun to hear similar calls, especially in regards to internet access in public schools and libraries. Will the desire arise for a further centralization of knowledge, perhaps this time through the corporate model?

It's also important to note that proliferation of opinion and publishing power is still largely in the domain of the affluent nations, mostly in the English-speaking economic north. Songok Han Thornton argues that "The Web is controlled and populated by First World nations that 'push' information and values onto an all too receptive periphery...[and] this global imbalance is widening. Indeed, within the geocultural core there is another kind of 'push' taking place: that of blatant Americanization."

We all know and concede that information is power; so does this blogging and publishing priviledge promise to further institutionalize the comparative advantage of the current axis of power in regions mentioned above? And, should we be concerned about this?