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Many times the charge has been made that weblogs compare unfavorably to other media in that they lack editors.
The charge provides an opportunity to point out a key difference between blogs and other media—and to point out the power of the blogosphere.
The point I’d like to make has to do with the groups of people who read weblogs, as much as with the blogs themselves.
Author James Surowiecki speaks about groups in an LA TIMES opinion piece:
...Under the right circumstances, groups (like the motley collection of bettors at a racetrack) are remarkably intelligent and are often smarter than even the smartest people in them. ...a diverse group of people, even if many of them are not especially well informed, will consistently offer better solutions than even the smartest expert.
The simplest demonstration of this is the jellybean experiment. Ask a group of 50 people how many jellybeans are in a jar, and the group’s average answer will be uncannily accurate within 2% of the right number and it will be better than the answers of nearly everyone in the group.
...At the racetrack, for instance, the crowd of bettors routinely offers accurate forecasts: The odds on a horse reflect, almost perfectly, its chances of winning. (Horses that go off at 3-1 odds, for instance, win just about a quarter of the time.) The Internet search engine Google relies on collective wisdom to rank the pages that have the information you’re looking for. It treats a link from one Web page to another as a vote on the worth of that page, effectively getting the Web to decide collectively which pages are most valuable. Google’s popularity is based on the routine excellence of those decisions. And the return on the stock market, even with investors’ irrationality and occasional bouts of hysteria and panic, is next to impossible for mutual-fund managers to beat.
...Our sense of caution about groups is justified there are myriad examples of collective craziness, ranging from lynch mobs to the stock-market bubble of the late 1990s. But in our haste to recognize that groups sometimes go wrong, it’s easy to overlook how often, and how powerfully, they go right.
The blogosphere makes it possible for those with opinions to communicate them to the massively large groups within contemporary society. It is the power of the group, super-charged. It is a movement.
Big media can’t do this as well as the blogosphere precisely because they are edited; they are organizations that seek to speak with one consistent point of view. Their reporters have their assigned subjects and their editors do not permit them nearly the freedom to write about anything, anytime, any way they want—a freedom bloggers have.
In the classic The Human Zoo, Desmond Morris describes how in the space of a few thousand years, humanity went from living in groups of 60 people, to cities of millions.
Living right inside of the moment as we do, it’s hard to see how fast things are changing. Via the blogosphere, today’s nation-spanning and even world-spanning groups can draw from the thoughts of many people—thoughts which would otherwise be inaccessible—to build their consensus opinion.
