Anne Truitt Zelenka

Via Mathew Ingram, I’ve rediscovered Kent Newsome after he somehow escaped my subscriptions list during our move from Maui to Denver at the end of March. Mathew blogs regularly on Saturdays and Sundays and so do I. We occasionally find each other in the quiet halls of the weekend Internet. It’s peaceful, like when you go into the office early in the morning before anyone else gets there. Last week, I was remembering a journalist-blogger whose name started with K, one whose articles I always enjoyed reading. This week, I’ve found him again. Thanks, Mathew.

Kent introduced me to the conversation around whether bloggers should link to other bloggers. Why share attention? Why divert the conversation? If a blogger’s ideas are so strong and valuable on their own, why reference anyone else’s? As Kent says, that’s arrogant bullshit. To me, it reflects an autistic approach to the medium. I see it as yet another misguided celebration of the independent individual, out of context and out of relationship. As I suggested yesterday, we need to understand ourselves in context and in relationship, especially on the chmod 777 web. Hey, if you think you’re the only one who matters but all your file permissions are set to -rwxrwxrwx, watch out! We’ll overwrite your ideas with our fresher ones.

When I link to other bloggers, it’s called an outbound link. But what I’m really doing is inviting new ideas and relationships into my own experience and into that of my readers. Outbound links represent inbound ideas as well as invitations for a two-way connection. Whether you link to other bloggers or not, you are not coming up with ideas all on your own. You may be remixing and adding and innovating, but you have to start from someplace. Your ideas don’t exist in isolation any more than your self does. We come into being in context and in relationship. So do our ideas.

Blogging, to me, feels more like channeling than creating. That’s one reason I don’t like the phrase “user-generated content.” Yes, I’m typing the words that flow through my head. I’m hitting the publish button when the ideas force themselves out. But mostly it feels like it’s coming from somewhere else, through me. I read and read and link and link every day. Then ideas build up pressure in my head, wanting to get out. They’re not coming from me so much as through me.

In January, I wrote about how Web 2.0 orbits the individual. That perspective doesn’t go away, but what I want to add to it is that the individual gains value and identity by acting as part of the network. Identity and contribution and value aren’t generated by the individual in isolation. Perhaps somewhere in this fabric of thought I can find a name to replace Web 2.0, which seems tired and sad.

Rick and I bought our first house from an older man who rarely left the house or had visitors. The air smelled stale and musty, not because of the seller’s age, but because he never opened the windows or invited new people in. I suspect that a blog or podcast could get like that, if the authors refrained from mixing with anyone new, interacted only with their cronies, and talked in shorthand about shared experiences. Such a blog or podcast might become unreadable or unlistenable by any but the authors’ closest compatriots and those flatterers who hoped to play the same fetid game. Name dropping and insider talk might dominate, while new readers would not be able to understand what the authors were saying, coming, as it did, from the cronies’ shared but hardly universal history. Meanwhile, ideas and connections will find other networks and channels to flow through, bringing energy and fresh air to those who thrive on it.