The Register, a respected if sometimes satirical news site for the IT world, recently ran a story covering Google’s specific search tools for Blogs. Most of the article was quite informative - as one would expect. Its coverage of indexing issues in a blog infested world was to the point and even enlighting. Reporting on the outrage of some bloggers at being given a specific subset of Google may even have been appropriate. Yet in the midst of the article I stumbled upon this:
“… There’s a case to be made for Weblogs as the most anti-social software yet devised. No wonder they’re so popular with egotists, as the right to speech without consequences reaches its apogee on the web soap box. Compared to bulletin boards, or group discussions, there’s no one to temper the conversation, or steer it to more useful outcomes. There is a lot of posturing, however, in this fragmented world of a Million Nation States of One. And as anyone who has tried to follow “the conversation” across dozens of fragments can confirm, it’s the antithesis of coherent discussion. So it’s revealing that one site which started as a weblog, and dropped the restrictive format in favor of editorial control and a Slashdot-style system, has become a runaway success: DailyKos” …
I do not disagree with the opinion set forth. Weblogs are inherently anti-social in nature. I do however object to foundation of the arguement - that a weblog should be social in nature and thefore bear the burden of checks-and-balances. In Freudian terms I do not believe that the Over-I (das Uberich) necessarily should be taken for granted, or even expected, in blogworld.
The very origin of a Blog is a extremely personal in nature. A Blog is in essence a public web site where a person posts informal journals of their thoughts, comments, and philosophies. If one accepts this to be true, then by definition this media is not meant to be sociable. A blog in this sense is a personal journal, in the traditional sense, but kept online, in publicly accessible space.
In my eyes the more interesing question then becomes: “why would one make publicly available private thoughts if not to undergo the scutiny of others?”
It has often been said that it is human nature to pry. In psychology, a parrallell can be laid with the “keyhole complex”, the need to know or assist what no one could ever assist, the moment of their own creation. That being said, perhaps it is not completely unthinkable that some of us like to be peeped in on - just look at the number of “stars” out there that tip off the papparazzi themselves.
Could it be that a good proportion of the blogs, at least at some level, exits to satisfy the need of some to be exposed and others to read the forbidden?