the ryan king

Tara’s going off on a crazy rant about blogosphere as religion.

It may be crazy, Starbucks-cup philosophizing, but I think there’s some interesting thoughts threaded through there.

First of all, it seems that technology has a way of polarizing people the same way that religions do. I’m not sure exactly why, but I have a few ideas that I’ve been thinking about, mostly inspired by reading The Psychology of the Internet.

I’ve been meaning to talk about the book, but I just haven’t the time to get my thoughts organized and written out. Needless to say, I highly recommend reading the book, as it will provide some significant insights for people who work on the Internet.

Back to Tara’s post, though. She says:

The blogosphere is our day to day – where we publish our voices and theorize. Our blogs are our ‘pulpits’, our posts are our ‘sermons’. But here’s the clincher, our ‘congregation’ – if you will – or those who read our blogs are also usually bloggers. They have their own pulpits and sermons and congregations (sometimes we are both the congregation and the ‘preacher’). Totally decentralized religion.

The blogosphere has beliefs…many of them. Niches of beliefs. We disagree strongly and often.

I would venture to say that the blogosphere’s biggest value is disagreement. At least, it seems, that this is what bloggers spend the most time doing and reading. Seriously, “me too” and “I agree with so-and-so” posts aren’t that interesting to read. So, the most interesting reading ends up being disagreement (and I think many bloggers know on some level that disagreement gets you attention).

Indeed, its hard to be a moderate in the blogosphere. In this vein, The Psychology of the Internet discusses a phenomenon from social psychology called the risky shift in which groups tend to polarize their members. Intuitively, we’d expect a group to balance each other out, but people with relatively moderate viewpoints tend to assume that their groupmates hold more extreme views, and to alter their own views in compensation [source].

The risky shift can happen in fairly small groups and I’d expect that the size of the blogosphere only amplifies the effect.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 25th, 2006 at 11:19 pm.