An Epic in Parallel Form

Tyler Cowen has an interesting post on the scholarly content of blogging in which he speculates as to how blogging and academic scholarship fit together. In so doing he makes some general observations about blogging:

Blogging is a fundamentally new medium, akin to an epic in serial form, but combining the functions of editor and author. Who doesn’t dream of writing an epic?

Don’t focus on the single post. Rather a good blog provides you a whole vision of what a field is about, what the interesting questions are, and how you might answer them. It is also a new window onto a mind. And by packaging intellectual content with some personality, bloggers appeal to the biological instincts of blog readers. Be as intellectual as you want, you still are programmed to find people more memorable than ideas.

It’s an interesting perspective. Many blogs are general in subject, but some of the ones that really stand out have some sort of narrative (for lack of a better term) that you can follow from post to post. As Cowen puts it, an “epic in serial form.” The suggestion that reading a single blog many times is more rewarding than reading the best posts from many different blogs is interesting. But while a single blog may give you a broad view of what a field is about, it can also be rewarding to aggregate the specific views of a wide variety of individuals, even biased and partisan individuals. As Cowen mentions, the blogosphere as a whole is the relevant unit of analysis. Even if each individual view is unimpressive on its own, that may not be the case when taken collectively. In a sense, while each individual is writing a flawed epic in serial form, they are all contributing to an epic in parallel form.

Which brings up another interesting aspect of blogs. When the blogosphere tackles a subject, it produces a diverse set of opinions and perspectives, all published independently by a network of analysts who are all doing work in parallel. The problem here is that the decentralized nature of the blogosphere makes aggregation difficult. Determining a group as large and diverse as the blogosphere’s “answer” based on all of the disparate information they have produced is incredibly difficult, especially when the majority of data represents opinions of various analysts. A deficiency in aggregation is part of where groupthink comes from, but some groups are able to harness their disparity into something productive. The many are smarter than the few, but only if the many are able to aggregate their data properly.

In theory, blogs represent a self-organizing system that has the potential to evolve and display emergent properties (a sort of human hive mind). In practice, it’s a little more difficult to say. I think it’s clear that the spontaneous appearance of collective thought, as implemented through blogs or other communication systems, is happening frequently on the internet. However, each occurrence is isolated and only represents an incremental gain in productivity. In other words, a system will sometimes self-organize in order to analyze a problem and produce an enormous amount of data which is then aggregated into a shared vision (a vision which is much more sophisticated than anything that one individual could come up with), but the structure that appears in that case will disappear as the issue dies down. The incredible increase in analytic power is not a permanent stair step, nor is it ubiquitous. Indeed, it can also be hard to recognize the signal in a great sea of noise.

Of course, such systems are constantly and spontaneously self-organizing; themselves tackling problems in parallel. Some systems will compete with others, some systems will organize around trivial issues, some systems won’t be nearly as effective as others. Because of this, it might be that we don’t even recognize when a system really transcends its perceived limitations. Of course, such systems are not limited to blogs. In fact they are quite common, and they appear in lots of different types of systems. Business markets are, in part, self-organizing, with emergent properties like Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”. Open Source software is another example of a self-organizing system.

Interestingly enough, this subject ties in nicely with a series of posts I’ve been working on regarding the properties of Reflexive documentaries, polarized debates, computer security, and national security. One of the general ideas discussed in those posts is that an argument achieves a higher degree of objectivity by embracing and acknowledging its own biases and agenda. Ironically, in acknowledging one’s own subjectivity, one becomes more objective and reliable. This applies on an individual basis, but becomes much more powerful when it is part of an emergent system of analysis as discussed above. Blogs are excellent at this sort of thing precisely because they are made up of independent parts that make no pretense at objectivity. It’s not that any one blog or post is particularly reliable in itself, it’s that blogs collectively are more objective and reliable than any one analyst (a journalist, for instance), despite the fact that many blogs are mediocre at best. The news media represents a competing system (the journalist being the media’s equivalent of the blogger), one that is much more rigid and unyielding. The interplay between blogs and the media is fascinating, and you can see each medium evolving in response to the other (the degree to which this is occurring is naturally up for debate). You might even be able to make the argument that blogs are, themselves, emergent properties of the mainstream media.

Personally, I don’t think I have that exact sort of narrative going here, though I do believe I’ve developed certain thematic consistencies in terms of the subjects I cover here. I’m certainly no expert and I don’t post nearly often enough to establish the sort of narrative that Cowen is talking about, but I do think a reader would benefit from reading multiple posts. I try to make up for my low posting frequency by writing longer, more detailed posts, often referencing older posts on similar subjects. However, I get the feeling that if I were to break up my posts into smaller, more digestible pieces, the overall time it would take to read and produce the same material would be significantly longer. Of course, my content is rarely scholarly in nature, and my subject matter varies from week to week as well, but I found this interesting to think about nonetheless.

I think I tend to be more of an aggregator than anything else, which is interesting because I’ve never thought about what I do in those terms. It’s also somewhat challenging, as one of my weaknesses is being timely with information. Plus aggregation appears to be one of the more tricky aspects of a system such as the ones discussed above, and with respect to blogs, it is something which definitely needs some work…

Update 12.13.04: I wrote some more on the subject. I aslo made a minor edit to this entry, moving one paragraph lower down. No content has actually changed, but the new order flows better.