a more general question

What is it about the blogosphere as a medium that encourages critique, negation, and opposition as the dominant mode of human interchange?

When I am invited somewhere to give a lecture, there are usually tough questions, but the general atmosphere tends to be one of co-operation and basic human warmth. You have drinks with audience members afterwards, and some of them may be strongly opposed to what you’ve just said, but there’s always a kind of valuable undertone of “we’re all in this together.”

In the blogosphere, that rarely seems to be the case. As a general rule, people post on your posts, or write to you about one of your posts, only to say that what you just said was completely wrong.

I suppose it’s not too surprising. This medium depersonalizes human relations. At a party, if you sat down next to someone and told them they were wrong about everything for 5 minutes, that’s obviously a socially inept move, and the conversation won’t go anywhere and the person will get up and leave after awhile out of boredom if not irritation.

In this medium, however, the person sitting next to you on the couch and telling you you’re wrong about everything for 5 minutes (relatively rare in social life) turns into the basic form of a majority of interactions.

In fact, it’s really such a crappy medium in many ways. But it does have some obvious virtues, such as speed, and hence it is here to stay.