[Dean's World] G. Willow Wilson: New Media and the Conversation

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Posted by G. Willow Wilson:
New Media and the Conversation
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1178202534.shtml


   Itâs a common thread in the comments section of many a political and
   cultural-issues website: blogging is useless. It affects nothing,
   changes nothing, has no impact on the greater issues of our time. When
   anonymous cyber-commentators fail to appreciate the fact that if
   blogging is useless, commenting on blogs is less than useless, irony
   is certainly deadâhowever, thatâs not my point. I want to talk about
   what I call âthe Conversationâ.

   The term first occurred to me when we started getting television out
   of Iraq again. Most if not all of the Iraqi satellite channels went
   offline during the first year of the war. Then, in the autumn of 2004,
   we started getting a signal: a simple computerized list of displaced
   Iraqis seeking their relatives that would scroll down the screen as
   Iraqi folk-songs played in the background. Though we didnât know who
   these people were, though a highly censored episode of Friends was
   playing on one of the culturally schizophrenic channels out of the
   Gulf, it seemed all of Cairo was glued to this timid little channel
   beamed from Baghdad. It was a sign; the olive branch retrieved from a
   flooded world, the simple message that the entire Arab world had been
   waiting for: âWeâre still hereâ. People watched that scrolling list of
   names and wept.

   ([1]show)

   And then, there were pixels: Deus ex machina, God from the machine.
   One little signal out of Baghdad had done more to reassure people that
   normalcy might again be possible than a year of press releases. I
   realized that what was truly crucial to the digital age was not
   information but conversation: a vast, real-time, evolving dinner table
   discussion about the state of the world. It was made up, by and large,
   of the voices of ordinary people with ordinary concerns, not grand
   theories. Bloggers, though often crude, formed an essential part of
   that conversation. Sure, blogging probably doesnât change very many
   minds about very much. It probably hasnât swung very many votes. But
   what it has done and continues to do is erode individual prejudices.
   The blogger effect is the butterfly effect: on the information
   superhighway, one person encounters another person of wildly different
   politics and disposition, and because the anonymity of the internet
   provokes a candor you donât get anywhere else, comes to respect him.
   They donât agree. Theyâll never agree. But what they will do is make
   an effort to understand each other.

   Those who run down the blogging phenomenon and new media in general
   misunderstand the nature of change: they expect it to come all at
   once, in a wave, as a sudden overturning. But more often than not,
   sustainable change happens one person at a time. There will be no
   revolution that reconciles East and West, no great détente that
   resolves Left and Right. Differences will never be eliminated, but
   they can be understood. In this capacity, the Conversation is not only
   far from useless, it is essential.

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References

   1. file://localhost/var/www/powerblogs/deanesmay/posts/1178202534.html
   2. file://localhost/var/www/powerblogs/deanesmay/posts/1178202534.html