BLOGSAVVY

Reading a post by D’Arcy Norman expounding (a bit) on the global community of edubloggers that Josie Fraser is illustrating through her rather nifty use of the mapping tool Frappr got me thinking about how perhaps the massive globalisation of our communities through blogs might in fact be creating far more local communities than we already have.

Put it this way, existing pre-web and to a large degree pre-blog our communities were generally made up of people geographically close to us. Yes, there have always been conferences and yes there have, in an academic sense at least, always been journals and alike but essentially our day to day communities were the people we work and socialise with. In fact, the development of listservs, newsgroups and alike didn’t necessarily change this to any great degree, we were still essentially part of a particular group which we had joined and our communities were people in that group.

With blogs though things are a lot different, now we don’t need to join a group to have a voice, we don’t need to necessarily have to conform to particular group social norms and we don’t need to engage with a fixed community… we can subscribe, unsubscribe, comment and place ourselves wherever we so choose, and not even worry too much about acceptance!

However, while we’re doing this we’re essentially selecting to read and interact with people that we feel we can either learn something from, get along with or whom we are interested in. It’s become a very very easy process and I’m wondering what the negative impacts of that might be on the diversity and significance of what we draw from a traditional community.

In a traditional community there will, odds are, be a fair number of people who disagree with us. There will also, and perhaps more significantly, be a broad range of expertise, interests and backgrounds that we might not necessarily come up against if we get to choose and are not forced to interact with these ‘other’ people (that’s difficult you see). Strangely, blogs might be doing more than just creating an echo chamber and in fact be making us into more blinkered, less tolerant and more ‘local’ communities.

Or, is it an improvement… a more efficient rationalised community model for an increasingly rationalistic age?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 27th, 2005 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Blogging for Community, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.