Laura at Apartment 11D sent out a survey to various webloggers to take a look at the politics of blogging, and was rather dismayed to find that one pretentious, tendentious individual was publicly outraged that someone would dare to ask him to summarize his opinion when they could have just read through 3 years worth of his long-winded dreck (I thought the best dismissal of this particular individual was made by a commenter on Crooked Timber: he's the Comic Book Guy of the blogosphere.) Anyway, this has engaged the attention of several academics, John Holbo and Henry Farrell and Brad DeLong, which isn't too surprising. Dissecting the nature of the discourse is probably second only to determining how we know what we know in the pantheon of academic pedantry. We'd love to understand better how information ping-pongs around in this peculiar ad hoc network that has crystallized around the weblog form, and how the form shapes our view.

What caught my eye, though, was this part of Laura's comment:

But when bloggers personally attack others, who are not public officials or celebrities just private citizens trying to go about their work, this undemocratic creation is deeply troubling. Especially since there is no opportunity to satisfactorily respond. Perhaps if I had a more important blog, I could respond in kind (and provide a link to his blog), but I don’t. My co-author doesn’t have even a little blog like mine, so she has no voice whatsoever.

Another nasty side effect of blogging is that hit counts can go to your head. Occasionally, hit counts can inflate egos creating not only the so-called pundits, but a hundred little bullies. Blogs are not soap boxes for speaking your mind, because bloggers don’t have to respond to hecklers in the audience. Blog readers don’t have the opportunity to hear responses to posts and weigh differing points of view. The heckler has been effectively silenced.

Occasionally, I see references in other blogs to the usenet. I was never involved in the usenet, but it sounds more democratic than blogging. People could discuss matters as equals. There was no central operator to control and regulate conversation. Loren King has a good post about his preference for the usenet.

There is a very good point there: the blogosphere isn't very egalitarian. There is a definite hierarchy, and worse, there's little evidence that merit is sufficient to define your position in the hierarchy; some of the best blogs out there, in my opinion, are 'little guys' in terms of the size of their audience, and several of the top-ranked blogs are just unreadable. However, as a usenet veteran, I have to say that her vision of usenet is a bit unrealistic.

Yes, anyone can get on usenet and speak their mind. There is no intrinsic mechanism to prioritize anyone's voice over another's. The news administrators are scrupulous in defending free speech; they are religious in avoiding judgment on the basis of content, and all they care about is ensuring that no one hampers anyone else's ability to express themselves. You can say anything on usenet, and your post has exactly the same weight as anyone else's. These are, in principle, very good things.

In practice, though, there are problems. Usenet is like an open park, where anyone can bring a soapbox and shout out their opinions. And shout they do. The flaw in the democratic model is that the ones who shout the loudest and the most frequently are the voices that are heard best. And hecklers may have important points to make, but what happens is that they get their own soapbox and try to shout down the original speaker. It is extremely easy for a newsgroup to reduce to a roaring cacophony of near-incoherent yelling, or worse, nit-picky dissection of something someone said a week before.

Laura is concerned about bullying in the blogosphere, but it can be far worse on usenet. There is no restriction on content, remember. In one unpleasantly memorable example, I have seen someone try to shout down an opponent by accusing them of incest with their deceased mother. Not by saying one crude four-syllable expletive, but by writing, several times a day over the course of weeks, luridly explicit, detailed imaginary accounts of the activities of the fellow and his mother. If that were on a blog, people would simply stop reading it en masse...but everyone has an equal voice on usenet. Every thread that either of these people participated in was quickly tainted with the drone of deeply repulsive pornography.

Oh, and the kooks. Usenet is a medium that delights kooks—they are on an equal footing with everyone, and their one strength, an obsessive persistence, is rewarded. I've written before about my encounters with Ed Conrad, a lunatic who frequents the newsgroup talk.origins. His claims of finding fossilized human remains in Carboniferous coal beds has been thoroughly reviewed and dismissed, and he still persists. He's not unusual. Anyone who is familiar with usenet will know the names Archimedes Plutonium and Robert E. McElwaine. I recently received e-mail from a computer scientist in Germany, Tristan Miller, who is trying to cope with another kook, Arthur T. Murray, a.k.a. Mentifex, who infests the comp.* hierarchy and makes bizarre claims about artificial intelligence.

It gets worse. The rewards of prominence and attention in a newsgroup go to the loudest voices, and one way to increase the volume is to form coalitions. There is an ugly history of something called Usenet Performance Art, where groups of people get together and "invade" a newsgroup; that is, get a mob of people to post nonsense in bulk into a group, or incite flames within or between other groups. They went by odd names like alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk, or alt.fan.karl-malden.nose or the Kingdom of Meow. They could reduce the signal-to-noise ratio of a newsgroup to something close to zero simply by replying to every post with a post of their own, containing nothing but the word "SNUH!" repeated a thousand times, for instance.

Seriously, one begins to lose all respect for hecklers after plowing through a few of those.

A successful newsgroup has to build social frameworks beyond those provided by the machinery of usenet. A reliable core of regular contributors who set the tone and represent a respected ideal of behavior to which the majority aspire is essential—and defeats the egalitarian principle right there. Strong newsgroups begin to build resources outside of what usenet provides. One of the best examples is the group I participated in most, which had one of those solid cores of dedicated users, who went on to establish the Talk.Origins archive, an extremely useful collection of information on evolutionary biology. It really owes its existence to a reaction against the anarchy of usenet, and was set up to provide a mainstream foundation, an authority, against which the kooks and ranters could be measured.

The Talk.Origins Archive is a collection of articles and essays, most of which have appeared in talk.origins at one time or another. The primary reason for this archive's existence is to provide mainstream scientific responses to the many frequently asked questions (FAQs) that appear in the talk.origins newsgroup and the frequently rebutted assertions of those advocating intelligent design or other creationist pseudosciences.

Weblogs are something more than the unfettered chaos of usenet. There's more structure, more sense of place: we can better pick and choose who we want to listen to, and we have the ability to reward quality (or at least, those who cater best to our prejudices, or entertain us best) with our measurable attention. Henry compares this to a coffee shop or a neighborhood:

Like Sennett’s patronizers of coffee shops, bloggers don’t usually know each other before they start blogging, so that it’s quite easy for them to reinvent themselves if they like, and indeed to invent a pseudonym, or pseudonyms to disguise their real identity completely. This has its downside - some bloggers take it as license for offensive behaviour - but in general, if you don’t like a blog, you can simply stop reading it, or linking to it. The blogosphere seems less to me like a close-knit community (there isn’t much in the way of shared values, and only a bare minimum of shared norms), and more like a city neighborhood. An active, vibrant neighborhood when things are working; one with dog-turds littering the pavement when they’re not.

And I think that a key point there is that webloggers have a stake in their virtual real estate, and at their best try to maintain it and keep it attractive. We also have the unusual ability to pick our 'neighbors', though, with the mechanism of linking. The dog turd littered weblog tends to find itself cut off from the good neighborhoods as it gets de-linked...although it may find itself picked up by those neighborhoods that happen to adore dog turds.

The properties of that dynamic network are what John Holbo finds interesting.

You have ‘hotspots’, i.e. especially link-rich nodes. Popular single blogs or clusters of closely interlinked blogs that, added together, amount to something. What do such clusters mean? Obviously there is sociology to be done regarding a social network of blogs, as with any social network. But studying the relations between law blogs and philosophy blogs and lit blogs and web design blogs and libertarian blogs, etc., has an axis of potential interest plausibly missing from most social networks. The blogosphere really is an idea space AND a social space. The links mean personal ties - alliances and enmities - but also argumentative ties, or at least connections between ideas or subjects.

I think one analogy is with the high school cafeteria. Everyone remembers that there was always the table for the cool kids, and the jocks, and the devout Christians, and the class clowns, and the nerds, and so forth. There were discernible ties between certain groups—jocks and cool kids were interchangeable at some points, but the nerds were pretty much excluded from both—and many kids considered belonging to the right group to be extraordinarily important. Weblogs are like those cliques and tables. There are the desirable groups (and note that Holbo, when he lists law blogs and philosophy blogs and lit blogs, etc., doesn't even mention science blogs. Dang. Stuck at the nerd's table again), and there's the same posturing for invitations to sit at the table with the groups we like.

There are obvious downsides to the cliquishness of the blogosphere, but if usenet is the alternative, that would be like a cafeteria where the seating arrangements were constantly scrambled every day. The end result may be a more desirable exposure to different points of view, but also constant uproar and routine foodfights.

Of course, if you like foodfights, that can be a good thing.