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March 16, 2005

What goes around comes around

I had a realization this morning while listening to NPR while half asleep that blogs and the "mainstream" media suffer from the same problem of constantly feeding off one another -- because I was half asleep, it probably seemed more profound that it really is, but I'll blog it anyway.

I've complained a lot in the past about how NPR the NYT and the New Yorker et al. all cover the same damn stories -- not just the big stories (which makes sense, after all -- I'm not upset that Abu Ghraib got coverage), but with the cute little human interest stories it's boring and redundant and lazy. Of course, I'm not the first to observe this and the problem extends to all media. Anyway, my half asleep revelation was that there's a fine line between a meme and lazy reporting. Since I've been reading a lot more of the mainstream, high visibility websites and blogs lately I realized that they all tend to cover the same things and it's kind of ... well, boring. Especially when the blog or site doesn't itself add much in the way of content or commentary while linking. How many times do I need to see a link to a wooden laptop? I mean, it's cool, but really.

I think that this redundancy is a legitimate part of the point of linking and how the web functions -- that if you don't have a certain weight of interest giving a website google visibility then you won't be able to find the trees for the forest. But if everyone continually covers the same stories, media consolidation or media democracy doesn't matter -- you get the same result.

I may be wrong on this philosphicaly or moral or what have you; I'm just thinking. It's probably one of those slippery slope (I almost wrote "slippery slop" which would be more appropriate!) things -- a little bit of repetition/memery is good, too much is lazy. Actually, I think it's more like the mapmaker's dillemma, but I can't seem to find a link for that (which is weird ... maybe I'm calling it the wrong thing?). It's my favorite paradox: a good map represents reality accurately and the more detailed something is, the more accurate it is. But the more detail you get, the harder it is to use and the most accurate map would just be a recreation of reality but that would be useless for actual mapping purposes. So, you need something that's pretty accurate, but also interpretive (I like it as an analogy about writing history).

Maybe the deal with linky websites is, I'm not so excited about the ones that don't have an interpretive theme beyond "this is cool." I mean, I love them, I read them, but I think they aren't doing much of a service. I don't apply the same principal to smaller blogs like my own, of course -- (although, ahem, I do have a theme). And everyone gets some latitude in their theme. And the NYT/NYer/NPR cabal -- well, I'll deal with them later.

So I guess my conclusion is to renew my commitment to not pulling links from other blogs and only posting links I find through my own searching or whate have you -- realizing that anything I find through google may well have higher visibility if it was already linked in someone's blog. (Is there a word to distinguish between someone's little semi-invisible personal blog [i.e., mine] and something like wonkette or slashdot? probably but I don't know it. tell me!). If I see something I think is interesting to my non-blog-reading friends on one of the megablogs then I'll send it to them the old fashioned way -- in an email.

So maybe that's where I'll leave it for now. Time to make the donuts.

Posted by mary at March 16, 2005 9:16 AM

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Posted by: melissa at March 22, 2005 3:30 PM

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