Marc Andreessen, in a fascinating post about lessons learned from blogging, started me thinking about fan clubs. After reading his post, I wondered what had I learned from blogging. Well, nothing very interesting: 1. Easier than expected. 2. More fun than expected. 3. Pleasantly surprised to see audience grow for the esoteric topics I blog about, such as scientific method and human evolution. These are quite different than Marc’s lessons.
But maybe not. I think Marc gets to the heart of the matter with this:
one of the best things about blogs is how they enable a conversation among people with shared interests.
Which is exactly what fan clubs and fan conventions do.
Every blog I read revolves around someone’s specialized knowledge. HuntGrunt, for example, is based on Joyce Cohen’s journalism: In her blog, she writes what few others could. Bloggers enjoy writing them, I enjoy reading them. I think blogs have done grown so quickly and become so powerful because they tap into something very fundamental and important inside of all of us: We enjoy talking about our area of specialization, of expertise; and we enjoy listening to others with similar interests. Fan clubs and interest groups were old expressions of this; blogs are a new expression.
Why are people like this? My theory of human evolution says that the human brain changed in all sorts of ways to promote occupation specialization, the big way we differ from our closest ancestors. The fan-club tendency evolved because it caused specialists to share their knowledge. This pushed forward technology just as scientific journals and conferences do. People who made shoes talked to others who made shoes and shared what they had learned. The result was not only better shoes but also better use of research effort: No one had to reinvent the wheel.
Blog posts are easy and pleasant to write because they allow me to do something I enjoy doing: talk about my area of expertise. Their esoteric subject matter is crucial: I wouldn’t enjoy talking about other stuff. Maybe this tendency has other uses. People with specialized interests who chat every morning via webcam — now there’s an idea…
‘People with specialized interests who chat every morning via webcam’
Here’s something interesting from the Wikipedia article on videoconferencing:
“It is known that eye contact plays a large role in conversational turn-taking …. While traditional telephone conversations give no eye contact cues, videoconferencing systems are arguably worse in that they provide an incorrect impression that the remote interlocutor is avoiding eye contact. This issue is being addressed through research that generates a synthetic image with eye contact using stereo reconstruction.”
I love this cartoon on the devolution of blogging. Reminds me of my own current blog (mine is rather more like blah-blah-blah-ging). Thought you might enjoy the funny, too, Dr. R.:
https://sethlevine.typepad.com/vc_adventure/images/blog_1.jpg
The “everyone wins” fact you highlight when it comes to sharing knowledge is strongly resonant of Robert Wright’s main points in his book Non-Zero – working our way toward more and more “non-zero sum” games, as history proceeds…blogs are a sort of non-zero space where ideas can be discussed/shared in a safe environm’nt. Good book- also great post. Thanks