truepeers:
In response to your earlier (3:40 pm) post, I think there must be a psychological pull toward the easiest answer and the simplist rhetoric. Laziness? Maybe, then, it’s not the simplicity that counts, but the consistency. “I always believe this person/group, because they are always ready to explain what’s going on.”
Either way, I agree that it would be good to make each person “a strong center in his or her own right.” But if there is a pull toward lazy, we either need to make being an SC even easier or exert a stronger pull towards it. As a practical matter, we need both elements.
I’m not quite sure how to define an SC, but surely it involves forming our own opinions through independent pursuit of truth, and being willing to do the necessary work to turn those acquired truths into an understanding. Both get easier every day – finding information through the internet, having multiple analyses only a few clicks away that we can “try on” and agree with or react against.
To the extent that this makes it an enjoyable thing to do, there may be enough impetus to push people away from lazy toward the SC. Do we need something more? A viral meme that advocates independence of thought? A renewed cultural ideal of independence, complete with social sanctions for the herd? I don’t know.
Someone here recently characterized blogs as being akin to a local watering hole or coffee shop, or maybe the salons of 18th century France – places where people who generally share the same outlook (or at least the same interests) get together to discuss things and shoot the sh*t. In a sense, then, they are already acting to organize people in a way that allows collective action toward goals that those people have independently decided are worth pursuing.
And, in fact, this kind of action happens frequently. Sarah Boxer probably received 1,000 emails over her Iraq the Model story, Barbara Boxer certainly knows by now that a great many people are aware of her willingness to play fast and loose with the facts and that they interpret it as compulsive grandstanding. And, of course, CBS got dinged pretty hard.
