Effect of Blogging on the World

Effect of Blogging on the World

Perry de Havilland of Samizdata.net: was a speaker at "Democracy & the Blogosphere" hosted by the Adam Smith Institute in London on 16 November 2004. Perry noted that most of the speakers were luke warm on the influence of blogging on the world, whereas, as de Havilland writes:

"I did a speech saying that the Internet - and therefore blogging (because blogging is the user-friendly front-end of the Internet - it is for me anyway) is destined (also big deal) to change the entire course of human history."

We definitely agree that blogging is still in its infancy and has a long way to go, but what will make blogging a tremendous world power of the future is its ability to put people into close contact with one another who would otherwise never come into contact at all - and this on an international scale. This development is in the making.... Through blogging, interest groups and alliances will be formed that previously were impossible - some good, and some bad, of course.

Currently, blogging is still pretty much an individual one-man sport, giving many - often opinionated - persons the opportunity to put their views out to the world, but as many bloggers are learning - that is often not enough. Ideas demand audiences and audiences demand a good show. Hence, real dialogue, teamwork and communicative cooperation are increasingly marking the blog world. Many blogs are going from one-man shows to multi-player team productions.

We might note as an aside that one of the most remarkable developments in blogging is the general resistance of older established mainstream academia (except for the younger generations of people who studied law) to enter the blogging scene - we think this is because they are either ignorant of blogging or too afraid to blog. But we think that this will change. The old non-blogging generation will retire and die out and the new blogging generation will take over.

Crossposted to LawPundit.