BLOGGING AS CONVERSATION: NO ECHO HERE

The very fact that David needs to make these points is surprising. Sometimes we get so caught up in conversations that we don’t realize what they are, why we need them, and why we engage in them so passionately.

I’ve recently been engaged in conversations about important ideas in five different media:

• Last evening I had dinner with the delightful Rob Paterson, and we gabbed on for the better part of three hours about a myriad of different topics near and dear to our hearts. I had never met Rob before in person, but I already knew him as a friend from reading his blog and our written exchanges.
• I just got off a Skype VoIP conversation with Matt Mower, advocate of Purple Cows and co-inventor of an RSS aggregator called k-collector that presents an interesting alternative to regular aggregators in the way in which it arrays information: With it, you can view your feeds, consisting of blogs, newsfeeds, e-mails and other RSS-subscribable sources, by person (who), by subject (what), by date (when), or by location of source (where).
• On my blog and on others’, I read and respond to comments, and sometimes even write posts that are conversations in my own mind. Specifically in the last two days I have discovered two wonderful new blogs, Northern Polemics by Kevin G, who in his ‘About” page lists ‘Things I Believe”, and Dirtgrain, by teacher Jan Eggers, whose poetry, like Kevin’s ‘About’ page, serves as a very personal introduction and an icebreaker for conversation. I became aware of both of these gentlemen from their comments to my posts, but our conversations have already migrated in part to e-mail.
• I have recently joined several new discussion groups, both business-related and environmental.

Face-to-face, telephony, chat, e-mail, weblogs. As the chart above (from my post last summer) shows, each has its place. I met Rob in person because he was in town, conversed with Matt by VoIP telephony because he had a lot of things he wanted to bat around, migrated from blog comments to e-mail with Kevin and Jan because I wanted to ask them something privately, and because a long two-way thread on a blog appears exclusive and unseemly. I generally repond to comments to my own blog to either thank someone for new information, or to clarify something in my article. I comment to others, similarly, to offer additional information or to ask for clarification. I believe comments are inappropriate and fruitless vehicles for heated debate. I’d make a terrible troll.

My contributions to all the discussion groups I joined were largely ignored.  I don’t know if that’s because I articulated my points poorly, or made points that others in the group did not deem worthy of discussion, or because I violated some unwritten discussion group protocol by not introducing myself properly as a newbie, or, as a newbie, had the gall to introduce new subjects for discussion instead of confining myself for awhile to responses to the regular members. In a way I felt (and perhaps others did too) that I was barging into the middle of someone else’s conversation. As a newbie in those ‘rooms’, no one knew the context for what I was saying. I was a stranger, and might as well have been talking in a foreign language. And also, although in my chart above I identify chat spaces as appropriate for back-and-forth discussion, the convoluted threads within threads seem to me a most awkward way of accomplishing this. Perhaps I’m too old to understand the flow and etiquette of this medium, but I kept breaking the rules by sending private e-mails instead of posts to the whole group (all of which, unlike my posts to the group, actually did elicit a useful response). More than once I looked for IM or Skype numbers for members because I found the discussion group technology so limiting. As a discussion group member, I’m a failure.

It seems to me the reasons we converse are complex and varied, and the fact that we choose to converse mostly with like minds is that it’s easier and more personally productive than conversing with people whose worldview is antithetical to ours. Most people change their minds because new information undermines the logic that had led to their former opinion, not because someone with an opposing view effectively challenges their logic. That is why the small clique of multinationals that now dominate the non-print mainstream media are so dangerous: It’s not what they say and report that narrows our perspectives and oversimplifies our worldviews, it’s what they choose not to report. The fact that there is almost no news about what in happening in the third world outside the Mideast, and no news about the environment, or about the loss of civil liberties or the outrage of gerrymandering or a thousand other important subjects is that the mainstream media, with a competitive eye on each other to make sure no one does anything different or disruptive to get out of step and require a costly and competitive response, deems all these ‘complicated’ and ‘slowly-developing’ issues unnewsworthy. Their groupthink directly produces ours. Read Jay Rosen’s brilliant article on ‘Master Narratives‘ for more on this.

So why do we converse, using any of the tools in the chart? Let’s start from the writer’s perspective, or the perspective of the initiator of the conversation. They’re trying to do some of these things:

From the reader’s perspective, or that of the respondent to the communication, they’re trying to do some of these things:

Conversations allow these two perspectives to blur, so that all participants can achieve any of the objectives from either of the above lists. And because they’re iterative, they allow us to at least begin to understand our own, and the other person’s, worldview and mindset, the context for what they are saying, and get past the blind spots and jargon and unstated assumptions and connotations, to reach, at last, common ground.