Blog Discussion and Citation

Tom Coates weighs in with a great analy­sis of dis­cus­sion and cita­tion in the world of weblogs, seek­ing to refute the claim made at iWire that the blo­gos­phere envi­ron­ment actu­ally con­spires against the suc­cess­ful evo­lu­tion of dif­fi­cult ideas and draw­ing on Microdoc News’ dis­sec­tion of the dynam­ics of a blo­gos­phere story.

His cen­tral anal­ogy is sound - when weblogs seize on a sub­ject, the com­bined use of hyper­text and dis­creet blocks of con­tent comes to mirror aca­d­e­mic cita­tion in research papers, with valu­able con­tri­bu­tions to a given debate gain­ing expo­sure thanks to a form of peer review, with blogs at the mar­gins serv­ing as arbiters of qual­ity by link­ing to points in the con­ver­sa­tion they see as significant.

Think of this post as an essay by an obscure post­grad­u­ate researcher, riff­ing on the ideas in Tom’s, which is equiv­a­lent to a paper deliv­ered at con­fer­ence to his pro­fes­so­r­ial peers — I’m not bring­ing much to the debate, but my cita­tion adds value to the orig­i­nal asser­tion. Unfor­tu­nately, acad­e­mia and the world of weblogs share other char­ac­ter­is­tics, includ­ing a hier­ar­chi­cal struc­ture - vide the many whinges about an ‘A-list.’ And that struc­ture gets in the way. Say I had some­thing earth-​shattering to say on the topic of infor­ma­tion flow in weblog con­ver­sa­tions and posted it here, ref­er­enc­ing Tom’s piece (I don’t, but that’s by the by!) Sure, Blogdex, Tech­nocrati et al would reg­is­ter my cita­tion, and push the post I cited up the indices, cement­ing its posi­tion at the centre of the debate, but my earth-​shattering propo­si­tion would go unheeded because few folk read Submit Response in the first place, and those that do don’t have weblogs (hard to imag­ine, I know).

I’m not doubt­ing that, as Tom says, debate across weblogs self-​organises in a pretty useful way at the moment, but I would say that this self-​organisation is too close to the aca­d­e­mic research pro­to­type. Weblog con­ver­sa­tions are just like accel­er­ated, minia­ture aca­d­e­mic debates, but the poten­tial is there for a new model that replaces the pyra­mid of a group­ing of influ­en­tial com­men­tary sup­ported from below by a mass of cita­tion with a flat­ter struc­ture, where rank­ing by ‘microcontent vote’ is com­bined with some sort of seman­tic index­ing to draw valu­able points made at the bottom of the pile toward the top. Of course, I have no idea how this might be acheived — how could a future imple­men­ta­tion of Blogdex know that, say, a link is in the con­text of a refu­ta­tion, not a sup­port­ing cita­tion? — but an inclu­sive, flat­ter view of weblog inter­ac­tion would be a valu­able one.

I could go on to draw a fur­ther anal­ogy, align­ing my posi­tion with the hard­line Marx­ist view of a truly state­less soci­ety post-​revolution, and Tom’s with the reformist, so con­strained by pre-​revolutionary bour­geois sys­tems that he cannot con­ceive of unstruc­tured organ­i­sa­tion by the people. But that would be silly.

Posted at 5pm on 25/05/03 by Jack Mottram to the web category.
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