Shelley, I think we’re talking past each other. You said:
However, telling me that I can’t disagree with Meg because of her status in the community, or that I must pay deference to the technology I’m using when I write this post, sorry, no can do. You tell me something’s untouchable and the first thing I’m going to want to do is touch it.
Meg explained what a cannonical weblog looks like. The same way that your English teacher explained the structure of a haiku, a sonnet, or a newspaper article.
Why is that important? Contrary to stavros the wonder chicken’s opinion that tools don’t matter, I think they do.
Why do tools matter? Because history is determined by contingency and chance. The current explosion of Conservative webloggers (for example) happened because of two things: Blogger and those planes that slammed into the WTC.
The combination of thousands of angry men looking for a place to rant about the evils of Noam Chomsky, due process, and bin Laden’s armies of the night; and a web based tool which allowed for these Good Christian Men(tm) to hyperventilate without having to worry about markup, or how to get a CGI script running on their webhost produced the zebra snail explosion we’ll be trying to clear out of the drain pipes for years.
Without a dead simple to use tool such as Blogger, those teeming throngs would be stuck trying to peddle their wares to the National Review and the Wall Street Journal. A few of them would bang rocks together until they could post a page online, but without toolsets such as Daypop and Google, they’d be as isolated and futile as a panda. Weblogs were a sparsely populated ecosystem, like North America after the Chicxulub Impact, to invade.
Given different events, we’d have some other batch of zebra snails to deal with, but the enabling technique–the adaptation if you will tollerate my evolutionary example–is the weblog format and tools.
Yes, this is a cynical analysis that ignores that there are people who are good writers out there in the weblog veldt, and some people do try to forge homesteads and communities. But I don’t think that’s what’s driving the growth: it’s the low barrier to entry of writing two paragraphs about how Ashcroft or Sadam are worse than Hitler, and pressing the post and publish button that’s doing it.
Again, I’m a cranky, middle aged materialist and I don’t see weblogs as some sort of Telihardian emergent world mind, but just what happens when you put lots of hairless apes together with tools, and hairless apes who like to make tools that that try and map what the other hairless apes are doing.
<screech throw=”offal”/>
So I’m not saying Meg’s untouchable because she wrote Blogger. What I’m saying is that it’s ridiculous to think that the current weblog ecology would had come about without the tools and the format.
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