There is no blogosphere. There is only the people in it.
It drives me nuts when peope continue to try to treat us as a mass. The blogosphere isn’t a thing. It is an uncollection of completely independent people talking. That is still the best definition of blogs I can think of: People in conversation. Just people: constituents, voters, customers, students, parishioners, neighbors, people.
But mass media keeps trying to lump us into a mass — the mass where we lived until we had the means to be heard as individuals.
Here’s Vaughn Ververs reacting to Richard Cohen reacting to the reaction to his column reacting to Stephen Colbert, to which Howard Kurtz also reacts. (And they call us an echo chamber?):
At the risk of running this topic into the ground, it follows my argument that the blogosphere is risking marginalization if it is perceived as a cauldron of anger rather than a repository of thought-provoking conversation.
We are not a mass, not a monolith, not even a medium. We’re just people talking. You’ll agree with some, disagree with some; like some, hate others. It’s just like life. It’s just people. The sooner you stop treating “the blogosphere” as a medium, the sooner you’ll understand how to interact with it. It’s made of people. Talk with them.
