This weekend, I'm off to the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium
It's a chance for those of us in the social computing field to get a chance to talk to each other: there are research groups at a variety of schools, teams at Microsoft, IBM (twice!), and a variety of other places, just on the CHI-attending, CSCW-publishing, SOCNET-reading academic side.
Then there's the bloggers. A fair number of bloggers--some academic, some from other backgrounds--spend a great deal of time studying blogs. (The course-oriented, now-defunct Metablog was a nod to that. The fact that there's a startling number of Google hits on metablog suggests I am not the first to notice this.
I'm now thinking about the symposium, and how information travels through the internet, and how these relate to each other.
There's certainly a well-known layer of bloggers, and some of those are coming out, too. Of course, word spread about the event, and now it has a virtual observer --and its own blog-sized tempest about just what sort of people were invited, and whether it's secret, and why it's invitation only, and whether this goes against the whole purpose of symposia, or of blogs, or of the web. (Read comments on Scoble's last , for example, to get some idea of more negative reactions.)
I guess I'm fascinated by several things. One is the deep desire to see each other face-to-face. As a CSCW researcher, I'm not really all that surprised: collaborative work is faster and easier when you meet face to face1. People like seeing each other, and getting a broader channel. On the other hand, we really like to tell a story about how distance doesn't matter. Perhaps we're coming to a better understanding of how the factors interrelate. And sometimes, you just need to come to the party.
The other is the way that the story echoed. David Wenberger has persuasively argued that the internet (or, at least, the world of blogs) is not an echo chamber. Rather, it's a place where people of like minds can explore the places where they disagree without having to rehash the basics, over and over again.
It may not be an echo chamber, but the discussion of the Social Computing conference got awfully loud. And it's not that other discussions of equal value aren't happening in other places: how about Scientists, designers seek same for good conversation: A Workshop on Online Dating? Or WS#19. Social Learning through Gaming?
Somehow, these haven't crossed the collective blogosphere's field of view. They aren't interesting yet. Why does the one echo, and the other doesn't?
For some insight, I'll turn to VanDyke's model of how news travels on the internet, which suggests that there's a comparatively small number of channels for information. I'd read a second-order idea, which is that there's a limited number of topics that the blogs can "pay attention to" at once. It's a combination of wanting to stay current, and of wanting to respond to each other--but either way, when the agenda is set on (say) "Bush and Vietnam", the political blogs on both sides pretty much stick to the topic, dedicating half or more of their coverage to the one topic.
We may criticize TV news for having a short attention span, and for only wanting to talk about one thing at a time. Certainly, the blog world does better than that in many ways: it seems to be more willing to check Lexis/Nexis, to pull up old interviews, to remember lost details.
But there are far more stories happening than Blogdex will tell me. More than news.google will tell me. A scan over the front section of the New York Times will tell me about more stories than will Instapundit or Atrios from their various sides.
So in summary: I'd suggest that the internet that isn't quite an echo chamber in the diversity of opinoins--but is a little constrained as to topics.
1 Note to self: Think about the connections between the rise of the internet and distributed work, and the new movements toward extreme co-location. Why is it that we're inventing stuff like XP (face to face, one keyboard, customer on-site), at the same time that we've got an internet so cool we can edit movies and write code around the world? Perhaps it's the case that we're now tried the distributed thing, and--well, it's not always right. (IIRC, Joel Spolsky's written about the competitive advantage of not offshoring before...)
March 28, 2004 02:02 AM | TrackBack | in Microsoft Social Computing