Combatting the echo chamber: a challenge

By the standards of the Truth Laid Bear's Canadian blogs community, I have a "midlist" blog with a pretty average-sized readership. It fluctuates somewhat, of course, with less traffic in the summer and more during an election or when I write something that gets linked around a bit. But for the most part, the audience for Canadian political commentary just isn't all that big, and even the bloggers at the top of that list have to be satisfied with a few hundred hits per day.

I've been aware that things look a little different south of the border--I mean, I've heard Markos Moulitsas on the radio talking about how his Daily Kos gets between five hundred thousand and a million hits a day. But last week, when my post about the cultural implications of George Bush massaging German Chancellor Angela Merkel got linked by an A-list American blog at the same time that blog got linked by the Washington Post, I had my first brush with the kind of traffic that some of those folks get on a regular basis. (It's more or less back to normal by now, although I'm still getting dozens of hits per day from all the google traffic--I'm apparently in the top five hits on "Bush groping," and number one for "president bush touching woman.")

Now, I admit that my first reaction was to be pretty excited--after all, if we bloggers didn't care about being read, we'd be writing our screeds in our personal diaries and hiding them under our pillows. It didn't take long, though, for the excitement to give way to a sort of irritation. I like to think that I've written at least a handful of decent posts over the couple of years I've been doing this, but I slap something up there with the words "george bush" and "groping" in it, and I've suddenly made the big time? All at once I had a lot of sympathy for Just Society's observation that when you write "Michael Ignatieff" or "Warren Kinsella" in your post, you get a lot more traffic than when you write about things that actually matter to you. More frustrating even than that was the fact that most of my visitors were from the U.S., and pretty much none of them stuck around to read anything else. And apart from making a few snarky remarks to my friends about that annoying tendency Americans have of ignoring anything that's not about them, there wasn't really anything I could do about it.

Picking on the Americans isn't really the point in this case, anyway, because the whole damn blogosphere is like this. The mainstream media has leveled a lot of criticism at us bloggers in the last couple of years, and among the most apropos is that we're nothing but an echo chamber. Let's try an experiment: Raise your hand if you regularly read a blog written by someone with someone with a very different political perspective from your own. Keep it raised if there's more than one. Keep it raised if you also regularly read at least one blog written by someone who lives in another country. Keep it raised if that country is not the United States. Is there anyone left with their hand still raised? I'm betting pretty few. And when it comes to political and cultural blogs, this is a particularly damning assessment because it means that we're using the full power of the Internet not to expand our horizons, but to narrow them. When all we do is listen to our own opinions magnified a dozen times in others, then this is precisely the sort of behaviour that entrenches our unconscious confirmation bias (hat-tip to Andrew and Jim Elve) beyond repair.

I've written in the past about the importance of resisting the Balkanization of the blogosphere, and over time, I've tried to put my money where my mouth is. My blogroll (visible on the front page) contains not only fellow NDPers, but non-partisans and partisans of various other stripes, and not just fellow Canadians and Americans, but bloggers from several parts of the world. With this post, I'd like to challenge everybody who reads this to do the same. If all bloggers saw to it that we could keep our hands raised in my little experiment above, then we might not change the world, but we'd at least think a lot more interesting thoughts and have a lot more interesting conversations. Human nature makes it awfully easy for bloggers to Balkanize, but luckily for us, the nature of the Internet makes it just as easy to resist that tendency if we so choose.