Friday night I was listening to the Boston-based
NPR show
On Point. The
episode was about how reading affects the brain. It was interesting, but that's not what I want to talk about. There were two guests on the show. The main guest is a professor of child development at Tufts, and the other a professor of educational communication and technology at Wisconsin's very own UW Madison. This latter guest was brought in as a counterpoint to the main guest's fear that people spending more time with videogames and on the internet were missing out on many of the amazing benefits that reading bestows upon the brain.
Given the UW prof's area of focus, the conversation of course eventually came around, briefly, to blogs. She claimed that just as the
Guttenberg printing press enabled the "democratization of knowledge", blogging will bring about another fundamental shift. One where, as before, some very nice things will be left behind, forgotten by most, in sacrifice to the emergence of a new mode of interaction that will bring about it's own useful new evolutions and societal impacts. I found this a tremendously interesting proposition, and hoped they would follow this line of thought a bit more, but unfortunately the host had latched onto some earlier point and swung back around to that, never to return.
I'm not sure I heard another word of the broadcast anyway though because my mind was off and racing.
Many people have already staked a claim on the blogosphere as the next frontier in journalism. Rejoicing has already begun that journalism will migrate into the blogosphere and morph into something new and different than
ye olde journalisme, bringing enlightenment to all and ushering in
the Age of Aquarius.... Certainly it will offer a new value proposition, but I am not yet convinced of the extent to which blog journalism will supplant
traditional journalism. Regardless of that, however, these people are thinking too narrowly.
Let's go back for a minute to that statement about "democratized knowledge". I've heard this turn of phrase several times in reference to the rise of the printing press, but never really stopped to think about what is really being expressed there. The history of human communication seems to me to track very closely the history of significant "advancements" in civilization, and with a bit of thought I think it becomes abundantly clear why this should be.
When speech and body language were all that was available, the spread of knowledge was a social affair. You needed to have at least two people, in close proximity, interacting more or less directly. The advent of writing freed knowledge from the bounds of proximity in space and time. But consumption was serial because the recordings required a huge time investment. First one person, then another, then another.... If the recording was not lost or stored away in a private library. The printing press resolved these issues. It became trivial to make multiple copies of a manuscript. Copies could be made as long as there was demand for them. If some were destroyed others would survive.
The printing press made knowledge available to all those who desired to consume it. It was no longer the privilege of rich or powerful men. If you could read, you could learn, regardless whether someone was available to teach you personally. One man's idea could be made available to thousands, across time and space, and generally without concern for the social position of the consumer. This is what is meant by the democratization of knowledge, and it really was a significant turning point in human history.
I contend that the rise of blogging is the next great evolution of human communication. Sir Isaac Newton is quoted as having said "If I have seen farther, it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants." How do we know they were giants? Because they had the time and resources to make recordings of their ideas, and people valued them enough to demand and preserve them.
In the past there were generally two ways you could get your ideas disseminated to humanity at large. If you were privileged enough to have the time and resources, you could finance a recording of your idea regardless of its perceived value. Or if you really believed in your idea, you could make a big sacrifice to get it recorded, and pray that people valued it enough to compensate you for your investment.
With blogging, these restrictions are largely abolished. If you have access to a computer, you can create a blog, for free, as I've done here. You can record your ideas as quickly as you can type them, and once you post it, it is instantly available for billions of people to simultaneously search for, stumble upon, consume, discuss, and share.
Newton and Einstein stood on the shoulders of giants. With blogging, we no longer have need of the giants. For you and I to see farther, we can assemble a great pyramid of normal human beings, each with a small contribution that in aggregate has potential that the "little people" of the past could only dream of participating in.
We can also move beyond ideas and into expression and experience. Blogging allows us all to share with the world our unique experiences, our viewpoints, our disasters, our epiphanies, our
humanity. No matter how mundane our individualities may be judged by most, we now have the potential to find the other people out there who are weird in the same ways we are. With increasing frequency and ease we can now connect online with someone else who has shared our joys and sufferings, our beliefs and needs. Someone with whom we can identify and be comforted. Or we can peer into the "mundane" individualities of others, and experience the wide breadth of simple but beautiful diversities of humanity. These are often things that are difficult to get published in print, unless the presentation is particularly engaging, or the story is something that we expect will touch large groups of people. Online these barriers do not exist. And we need not simply consume the others' narratives either. We are empowered to interact with the speaker and participate in their narrative.
I could go on into more specifics, but instead maybe I will dedicate another post to that sometime down the line when I've thought about it a bit more.
To put it succinctly, Gutenberg's printing press enabled the democratization of the
consumption of knowledge. With the emergence of blogging, we are witnessing the democratization of the
production of knowledge and of
expression of the human experience.
Maybe not the beginning of the Age of Aquarius.... But I think it's a bit of a "big deal" nonetheless. Though I am probably late to the party on this.