This morning I read and commented on a post by Will Richardson in which he reflects on the 130 plus comments that one of his earlier posts received. He asked the following questions within his post and I replied as indicated below:
Question: Can anyone really read through 130 comments? Answer: Not all the time.
Question: Are we getting too distracted, too connected, too participatory for our own good? Answer: Yes.
When I began using Netscape I used to bookmark everything. It was all so new. It was like being a collector. An obsessive compulsive disorder. I just had to collect that next bookmark. Those hundreds of bookmarks are on a CD-ROM gathering digital dust.
There are only about a dozen websites that I regularly visit now. That is enough.
But then there is those 184 blogs in my RSS reader. Will the majority of those blog feeds go the same way as my deceased bookmarks? I think so.
That question again: Are we getting too distracted, too connected, too participatory for our own good? Answer: Yes.
I feel that there is a considerable amount of redundancy within the edublogosphere, a consequential reduction in original thought and the growth of an edublogging elite.
March 23rd, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Like you – and maybe this is because we teach instead of having desk jobs? – I do almost no feedreading now. Most blogs are echoes of others, and focus on tools instead of bigger issues. Worse still, blogging and other forms of connecting are still, in the end, just talk – for 99% of us, anyway.
I like connecting for trying to make coordinated action happen. There’s much power and potential there.
In any case, here we are: a couple of guys still driven to write, regardless of how much we read others.
In the old days, that was just called “being a writer.” I prefer that definition. “New writing”?
I don’t have to read everybody – don’t want to, either, as the ranks mushroom – to want to write. Nobody else has to read me. In this sense, blogging is not revolutionary. Supply and demand still rule the economics of writing and reading.
I do appreciate your comments when you visit, though. Always eloquent, clear, challenging – that is revolutionary.
It seemed like there was an ‘edublogging elite’ when I entered this world 16 months ago. I’m not sure I think so any more. I rarely read any of the elite – Richardson and Fryer and McLeod are exceptions, and Stager (but even them I read irregularly). And I discover new people all the time through Twitter follows and such.
Then there’s guest-blogging, the (flawed but useful) Edublog Awards to recognize new voices each year, there are Nings and again, Twitter – all of these seem ways to stir the pot.
Ah, John, it’s so different trying to write and leave comments as a husband instead of a bachelor. My apologies for the fragmentation – I feel a bit pressured to finish!
March 24th, 2008 at 7:40 am
Clay, thanks for your excellent comment… allow me the time to consider it and I shall respond a little later,
Cheers, John.