Ryan Anderson dot ca

I have a confession to make. I am lonely. Painfully so. I didn’t realize this until today, but thankfully, I had University of Calgary professor Michael Keren to inform me of this through an article on Canoe about his new book, “Blogosphere: The New Political Arena.”

I admit that I have not read the book, but if the article accurately depicts its thesis, then it is painfully stupid.

Keren is quoted as saying:

in this world of blogging, which the whole world can read, you have a personal expectation about a readership that’s just not there for the millions of bloggers who are writing their personal feelings.

Many of us end up like Father McKenzie in the ‘Eleanor Rigby’ Beatles song, who is writing a sermon that no one is going to hear. Some of us are going to be embraced by the mainstream media, but the majority of us remain in the dark, remain in the loneliness.

While it’s true that many blogs are written about personal topics, Keren’s description of the blogosphere seems to equate all bloggers as a homogeneous mass. The nine blogs that he follows and chronicles for the purposes of the book seem to be what we would refer to as “cat blogs;” as in someone that blogs the minutia of their lives, including what their cat did today.

To then apply this type of blogger to the rest of the blogosphere is not only ridiculous, it’s academically irresponsible. His description of these particular bloggers as sad and lonely may well be correct, but his statistically irrelevant sample size can certainly not be extrapolated onto the blogosphere (which, remember, is the title of the book) as a whole.

Beyond being reductive, this analysis ignores the core reality of the blogosphere as a major social change. Individually, bloggers do not matter, this much is true. The real social change comes from the democratization of the tools of distribution, once only held by a few. Together, bloggers represent the potential for a major force of change. To equate this force to a few bloggers who live in the woods and talk about their dead cat is like someone in the fifteenth century saying that the printing press is just a bunch of weirdo monks just making bibles.

I’m not naive enough to believe that every blogger is making a social change – they’re not, and frankly, there is a lot of crap out there. The great thing about the web is that not everything has to be good, but the crap can easily be filtered out.

Another, much better article on the book touches on the veracity of blogs:

Although the medium offers seemingly unlimited freedom of expression, Keren said bloggers too often shape public opinion by reporting distorted versions of the facts.

“Social dialogue and political dialogue must be marked by restraint — one of the victims of the blogging phenomenon is the truth,” he said.

I’d just like to emphasize for lovers of irony everywhere that the first paragraph was written by a Sun Media journalist – the same franchise which, on numerous occasions, has referred to the Ontario Liberal Party as “fiberals.”

Keren does have a valid point, however, about not believing everything you read. The thing about the blogosphere is that it has an excellent bullshit detector. If I were to write something blatantly false, someone (probably Joe) would call me out, either in comments or in another blog. The more influential I am, the larger this effect.

Again, individually, the credibility of blogs is suspect, but in the aggregate, most errors will likely be found out and called out. Furthermore, the natural bias of an unedited personal opinion is evident, and it should come as a surprise to no one that nothing written in any one blog should be considered above suspicion. To me, what is far more harmful is the facade that anything in the mainstream media is true and unbiased. Anyone working in the media knows that this is often far from the truth, but sadly, many consider the print and television news as the unbiased truth.

The reality is that there are good bloggers and bad bloggers, PR bloggers, cat bloggers, political bloggers and a whole lot more. Some are self-interested, some are as unbiased as any newspaper. Some, I’m sure, are lonely and some lead rich lives and are among the most influential and intelligent people in the country.

However, as long as we’re toting out stereotypes of lonely, ineffectual individuals with no relevance outside their small and insulated peer group, I can think of a few about academics.