Last Thursday evening I went to a presentation at MIT called: Our World Digitized: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. There were 3 well known media studies authors there; Yochai Benkler, Cass Sunstein, and Henry Jenkins (only the moderator though). Their discussion wasn't specifically on blogs, but they did mention it and some of their ideas do relate to blogs.
Sunstein started off one of his arguments with a study he was a part of in Colorado. He took people from Colorado Springs and people from Boulder, both of which are political opposites, and got them together to talk about politics. They were given a few questions beforehand and were to answer them based on their opinions. Then after the study they were to answer the same questions. After being with people like themselves for a while the peoples' ideas became more and more radical. He used this to outline that political bloggers only link to like-minded bloggers where they say why their candidate is the best and why the others are a bad choice. Sunstein's basic argument was that the Internet is polarizing because of this. Benkler's response to this is that it is just a facilitator because people have been doing this for awhile (used Fox News as an example).
They both also mentioned that people that are talking with like-minded people feel smarter and think that the people they are with are smart as well, so it makes us feel better about ourselves. They both also agreed that this clustering is good and bad. It is good because people become involved and have their say. But it is bad because people become more ignorant toward other opinions, their opinion is the only one that counts.
They also talked about Wikipedia and its goods and evils. I was fading and starting to lose interest so I didn't take any notes on that either. You can listen to the whole thing and eventually see a podcast and a videocast here.
What does everyone else think? Do you think that blogs make people ignorant of other people? What are the pluses and minuses? Do you think Wikipedia is good? Can you think of other ways that online communities, or clusters as they called them, are bad for society?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I do think that blogs were important to what Benkler and Sunstein were saying, implicitly, also. The event began with Henry Jenkins saying "This isn't a distopian/utopian discussion" but honestly, I really think in many ways it was. With Cass Sunstein taking the distopian view-- or more accurately the skeptical view, while Yochai Benkler took a more Utopian- or celebratory-- view.
Justin's summary of this study about the Colorado Springs seemed really useful, 'cause it was a really strong empirical study which showed why we should be somewhat skeptical of the internet as being more democratic. When people spend too much time with people they agree with, they become polarized about their views. This seems like a really, actually dangerous view.
An audience member asked a question which I thought was really interesting, also. Loosely translated she asked, "Isn't it possible that there is also some important political possibilities created by Polarization? That only people who do have strong political opinions really organize and become activists. When people are not too committed they are not likely to fight to hard for their position. This provoked what I thought was the most insightful moment from the two commentators-- they each agreed that what was necessary for real democracy, was not simply activism for one's own position-- but a deeply ingrained belief in THE PUBLIC GOOD, which required that everybody sought for ways to meet the needs and demands of everybody in society-- of THE PUBLIC. If the internet has possibilities it has to be because it strengthens a notion of THE PUBLIC.
Post a Comment