July 19, 2003

Chris Lydon Interview with David Weinberger

Chris Lydon Interview with David Weinberger

Audio Transcript

Part 1: The Internet Reflation

Chris Lydon: David Weinberger is surely one of the front-runner candidates for philosopher king of the blogosphere. He is a Philosophy PhD, in fact. He's an n elegant prose stylist in all matter electronic. He was the co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto in '99; that was the "markets are conversations" book about the Internet's transformation of business. His new book is called "Small Pieces Loosely Joined", describing the web. David Weinberger, guide us through your nation here. Let me just start by saying something a little provocative. I have a sense you're leading the, shall we say, reflation of the Internet. After the crash, after the bubble burst, there's a new confidence and you're leading it. Is that fair?

David Weinberger: Well, except for the "you're leading it" part, yeah, I think that's fair. My bubble never popped, I'm still in my Internet bubble. The bubble that popped was a commerce bubble and it needed to be popped. In one sense we're all glad that it popped because we knew it was going to happen but that focus of intense interest in the internet as of way of reaching markets and of redoing business and of cutting costs and being more efficient, that never, from my point of view, was never driving the interest in the internet. And that interest has continued to be driven by the same thing and continues to grow.

CL: Which is what? How can you tell?

DW: Obviously it's a really hard question. All you can do is pick a path through it and one of paths through it is to say well probably judging from what seems to be exciting people, it's something as primitive as connection, as being connected to other people. It's not just that, though. There's something about the nature of the connection. It seems because of the nature of the Internet that the connections tend to be full of human voice. So, we go onto the internet and now we are able to not only connect with everybody else in the world who has a connection, there's 700 million people or so and growing pretty dramatically, but we're also able to do this by talking about the things that we care about, not the stuff that is being broadcast to us, and to do so in our voice, our own way of speaking, to sound like ourselves and that's becoming increasingly less available in the modern real world and suddenly there's this new world where it's the very currency and it's the very content and it's the very reality of this new world, it's the human voice.

CL: I had the same experience and I compare it to the best of talk radio, which I think we were part of. But this sense of hearing the voice literally but the spirit of a free personality, persona that's located that has an intention, information and enthusiasm is a kind of miracle. I was a little surprised yesterday with Eugene Volokh that he kind of tapped down my revolutionary enthusiasm. He said, well it's, you know, bloggers are basically yesterday's op-ed writers and the system may be more permeable than it used to be but he was sort of downplaying the hype. I'm happy to hear you hype it.

DW: [Laughs] It's always possible to downplay any hype and to say that something really isn't all that new because nothing's really all that new. We're still human beings, we're still talking with one another. On the other hand, if anything can be counted as new and important and, in fact, touching human soul and human spirit, I think you almost have to say that the internet is the leading candidate for that.

CL: Try to nail it down. If the medium is the message, as we've come to believe, and that the architecture of the communications system somehow shapes the content, what is this sensibility that we're noticing in blogspace?

DW: The architecture of the web is links. Without links there's no web, there's a big pile of paper that doesn't amount to anything or a pile of non-paper that doesn't amount to anything. So, at the very base of it it's about links. When I build a webpage, whether it's a weblog or anything else; if I build a webpage for myself, not for my business, I will always put in links; otherwise it's just not part of the web. And in doing that, in my weblog, if I say "so and so just blogged this" or "here's an article that was interesting" and I put in a link, what I'm saying is you're interested in the same sort of thing as I am, I think, so go away from my page, just go away! Don't stay with me! Go somewhere else. I don't want to make too much of that but that is a little selfless act, a little act of generosity that's foreign to the commercial sites that are on the web that still think about sticky eyeballs, that's their goal, is to create sticky eyeballs, which is the most demeaning way possible to think about your customers. Their aim is to keep you on their site because they're trapped in that mentality. The rest of us have learned and have built the web link by link through these little acts of generosity. It's a big difference.

CL: What would you say about the tone of voice, the politics, the level of language that you confront among blogs?

DW: [Laughs] Well, with so many blogs it's impossible to generalize about them, it's literally impossible because nobody is ever going to be able to read them all. That won't stop me, however, from generalizing about the ones that I care about and, I think in general have hit the media as what blogging is about. And the tone of voice, first of all, tends to be passionate, which is something that has been stripped out. This is a 1950s conformity sort of critique but it still holds, it's been stripped out of American life by a variety of factors. Passion has been stripped out. The web only exists because people cared enough about what they're writing about to do it. I mean, there's somewhere between 20 billion and 500 billion pages on the web; that's a pretty big spread, but there's some huge number of pages that've been built by people who cared enough or had some passion. The centering of voice on passion, of understanding that voice that is in any sense genuine is always going to be an expression of passion is certainly not unique to the web; it's by no means unique to the web but it is an important generalizable characteristic of the web.

CL: Absolutely. And a grazer notices that "Holy Mackerel!" things are jumping in this space and they're not in the media in general. I want to come back and talk to you some more about media but let's hold it right there for the general transformation.

Part 2: The Media Turned Upside Down

CL: David Weinberger is the JOHO blogger and the author most recently of Small Pieces Loosely Joined. He thinks a lot about this strange new territory we're in on the web. Would you talk a little about where we are in relation to institutional media?

DW: Well, we're at the inversion of it; the basic broadcast model that says only those who have sufficient means to reach a mass market are enabled to talk to that mass market. So, with the broadcast medium came the massiveness of the market. On the Internet it's a basically an irrelevant paradigm, it's a hated paradigm. We're rejoicing in our liberation from that. Everybody gets to speak and may not get to speak to a hundred million people but that's primarily probably because you're not being interesting enough for a hundred million people to listen to you, and that's fine. You know, who is interesting enough?

CL: A lot of good dinner table conversations out there.

DW: Absolutely, and if you have fifteen people or five people who are reading your weblog and they care about it, that's fantastic. You couldn't have done that before in any real sense.

CL: On the other hand, I mean, Andrew Sullivan is up to a hundred thousand hits a day; that's a considerable transformation right there and I also wonder, you know, is the power of individual expressive, passionate people talking eventually going to overwhelm institutional media?

DW: Well, it seems like there's going to be a filling-in of a continuum between the lone voice and the institutional medium that's still going to be broadcast and the newspaper is going to be around for a long time. We already have a new class of Op-Ed columnists, like Sullivan, who's basically functioning in that way, his pretty large audience, all the way down, I hate to use that devaluated term, but all the way down to the individual blogger who's talking to two friends and everything in between. But we're inventing that stuff as we go along. We're inventing group blogs, which doesn't fit into any real world model, not very conveniently. We're inventing audio blogging and video blogging and all the rest of it, so we're in this enormous period of invention, filling in the continuum, where there used to be nothing but a gap. You had a voice that could be broadcast or you didn't, and now you can. That by itself is an important difference.

CL: In the meantime, the FCC, as I see it, is clearing broadcast space for monopolists so avidly that they're in effect, real effect, driving voices and curiosity onto the web.

DW: Yeah and I had hoped and I had thought that were would be instead a softening of the media by the presence of the voices on the internet that we would see the borders getting murky and instead, just as you say, it seems like we're in maybe a last-ditch effort to take the existing media and to strengthen the wall, to build up the wall, which ultimately, I think, is going to be a doomed effort but for now whether it's the Recording Industry that's not giving any ground basically to the voices on the web, or it's the newspapers and FCC and TV. It does seem to be we're heading to an increase bifurcation rather than a lessening of the...

CL: I puzzle, David, why the bloggers and the web voices in general have had so little effect so far; for example, on the Bush Administration. Or is an effect building that we will see later? The Bush Administration has been pretty bloody impervious to the commentary on the web and I wonder why. When does the effect kick in?

DW: That's a great question. Nobody knows but maybe with some of the candidacies we're seeing now, we're beginning to see some of the kick-in. But there already is an effect. It doesn't mean that the institution has yet responded appropriately but that's not the only place where there's an effect. So, here's what I mean: there's a critique of objectivity that everybody knows, everybody knows the problem with it, it's not really what it says to be because the reporter is always still involved in her/his story, even if you try to extract her from it and there's a strength objectivity as well, which tries to show us the world as it would be if we weren't looking at it and there's great value in that. Likewise there's a particular subjectivity that everybody knows, mainly you're relying upon one or two people's point of view and they might be wildly wrong. So, along comes the web and along comes weblogging and now for the first time we have the ability to connect to enough subjectivities around the world, multiple subjectivities, dozens, hundreds, if you want, that we would could start to give subjectivity some of the heft that objectivity has reserved for itself that's made objectivity valuable. So, if I want to find out what's going on there's great value in reading the New York Times and I do, and I like it and I value it. There's also great value in getting 15, 30, 100 different viewpoints from people who are either at the scene or who are otherly reflective about it. So, this mass of subjectivity helps to give so many multiple viewpoints you begin to suss out the truth rather than having to rely simply on the objective point of view.

CL: Wouldn't it be nice to integrate all of those multiple subjectivities into a general conversation, I keep thinking?

DW: But that's a lot of what is attractive, is important about blogging, I think. Blogs often get portrayed, especially by the current institutional media as single voices that are proclaiming the new Op-Ed writers and sure, there's some of that, there may even be a lot of it. But the most interesting thing about blogs to me is the fact that we tend to link to one another and talk about what the other person has written. So, somebody will write something; AKMA, my e-friend AKMA who's a theologian wrote about forgiveness and inadvertently started threads that went who knows where but dozens of other postings talking about that same topic from different points of view; saying "AKMA was right about this" or "here is how it looks from my religion or from my stance" or "he's wrong about this." This is complex threads that nobody is ever going to be able to see all of but by reading that mass of threads you get a better view of what forgiveness is than you would get, I think, if you went to a single source, an authoritative source about forgiveness.

CL: Back to media. I got this out of Andrew Sullivan's page this morning. He's quoting a woman named Kathleen Parker of the Orlando Sentinel. She says, "what I once loved about journalism went missing sometime ago and it seems to have resurfaced as the driving force of the blogosphere. A high-spirited, irreverence, swashbuckling, lances to the ready of salt on the status quo. While mainstream journalists are tucked inside their newsroom cubicle deciphering management's latest "tidy desk" memo, bloggers are building bon-fires and handing out virtual leaflets along America's information highway. I mean, there's the hype but there's truth in it. When we come to feel that one hundred bloggers out there in Iraq, say, or in Africa or in Cashmere, or in Washington for that matter, are a better source for what's actually happening than the New York Times even.

DW: Well, I think that's already happened to a large degree, really. Sure. You count down the times to do the things that it is setup to do really well, which is to have a global network of reporters who are well-trained at gathering information and taking down people's stories and then presenting some type of balanced picture of it. That's extremely valuable but that's a limited role for what we need to understand our world. Balance is often a lie because not all situations are balanced. So, the Times, etc. will always be good at doing that but the human activity of understanding what's going on in our world has always been talk, has always been conversation and it's never been an individual consciousness because individual consciousness literally can't understand anything. It's always been about conversation, so now we have the opportunity to engage in the conversations we want in a global world. That's how we understand things.

CL: The media types and some impulse in me still says that it's gotta mediated, it's gotta be refereed, it's gotta be guided, not controlled, but orchestrated or something. Do we need a conductor of this conversation?

DW: We need to be able to find our own conductors and many of the blogs are in fact, that's what they're doing, they're picking out the stuff that they think
is interesting, commenting on it and pointing you at the source and at other people who are commenting on it. In building our blogrolls and our personalized aggregations, that's what we're doing. It's exactly what we're doing. We're finding the conductors.

CL: David Weinberger, you're fascinating. Take a deep breath and we'll come back for some more.

Part 3: The Dean of Bloggery

CL: David Weinberger, you're hip, you're hot, you're happening. This is good. I am so fascinated that Larry Lessig, you know, one of the great gurus of the blogosphere, opened his blog page to Howard Dean, who got right off to a flying start with this lead virtually. He says: "The Internet might soon be the last place where open dialogue occurs." That's an amazing manifesto for a guy who's gotta run the gauntlet of the traditional media for the next year. And he's getting overwhelmed with comments. It's an unbelievably active space if you haven't checked out Larry Lessig lately. Tell me what this means. Is this the first, the last, the ultimate or just the introductory politicization of the web or the webization of politics or what?

DW: I think it's fascinating also. I love the fact, first of all, that the Dean site has an actual blog. Not a pretend blog, not a controlled blog. Now the fact is it's written by his staffers who sign it, so they're not pretending.

CL: As the Volokh group bloggers do too, right?

DW: Right. It's a terrific, real blog. You can hear real, distinct human voices who care passionately about his guy's candidacy and I love that. That's something really new. The closest we got to that was books about going along on the bus or the making of a president if you want to go all the way back. But those are well after the campaign. This is real time, live blogging of a campaign. It's fantastic. So then Dean goes onto the Lessig site, he writes his own stuff. It's stiffer, far stiffer than what his staffers re writing on the blog. But that's alright because that's who he is, apparently. And you're right...

CL: Is he relatively aware of the copyright issues, the media issues, the control and FCC issues?

DW: Oh, what I think is even more interesting is that he's okay saying that he's not fully aware of the copyright issue. He's admitting in the Lessig blog that he's doing it. This is stuff that he needs to learn about and I like hearing that from a candidate too regardless of the Internet because I get really scared with people are are uncomfortable with ambiguity. The current administration's arrogance is an act of discomfort with ambiguity in the moral and political sphere. So, I'm very happy to see politicians who are almost always driven by the media to take absolute stances and never back off. Here he says, well I'm just getting my feet wet with this stuff, so help me out. So then you go to the incredibly active message board on the Lessig site for Dean stuff and we have never had a presidential candidate who has found himself, knowingly or unknowingly thrown into this fray, this maelstrom of unfiltered democratic opinion that ranges from the thoughtful to the grateful to the idiotic to the vitriolic and the vitriolic and stupid! We never had a candidate who has ever seen this side of life; it's the Internet, you know. Welcome to the Internet! I think it's great. I think it's a real change. There's no insulation between you and deceiving the humanity that you're talking to.

CL: Was it you who said, "Democracy just got a little realer"?

DW: Yeah...it was. [Laughs]

CL: ...when Howard Dean wrote on that page? Alright. But now what? First of all, you make a friend on your blog but you make an enemy at CNN perhaps or NBC or on the Tim Russert Show or maybe even in the New York Times. Do we get into a war of market shares for the American mind in terms of rising and declining media? Has he entered that crossfire already?

DW: It will be really interesting to see how that works out. My guess, which is totally uninformed, is that the media still need him and the candidates, that they can't afford to exclude him from the Sunday morning talk shows even if they don't like the fact that he's going sort of over the head of media to the people of the internet, to the internet constituency directly. But they still need him to be on there and they're still going to have Tim Russert, who's job seems to be to corner candidates to force them into extreme positions which they can then be attacked for. In my view, this is not what the media is supposed to be doing to make our democracy more vibrant. So, throw them into the internet where you have a bunch of jerks and yahoos as well as some very serious people talking and yeah there's enormous distraction, it's upsetting, on the other hand it is a far more direct confrontation with people's actual needs, desires and wants than you're going to ever get by sitting in the studio.

CL: But let me ask, you know in the sixties, starting with John F. Kennedy but in the late sixties with Gene McCarthy television was the medium with which they always said you go over the heads of the establishment and the party leaders to the people. Are there enough people out there in the blogosphere to make that difference?

DW: Well, there is, certainly for a presidential election especially one like the previous one, where apparently you just need another couple of million people to win. There were tens of millions of users of Napster who were also registered voters. And one of the things that Napster failed to do, I don't know how they could've, but one of the things they failed to do was energize that political base. It would not have taken a very large segment of the political base to make a difference in the laws effecting Napster. In the same way, as the truism, the cliché is that the largest party is the "I don't vote" party. What would not take a big chunk of the Internet constituency turned on by a candidate enough to go out to the polls and that makes a difference.

CL: Dave Winer, not to be confused with David Weinberger, he wants to make every New Hampshire voter a blogger, or let them become a blogger, I wonder how you think blogs could be made, blogs not in the hand of candidate but in the hands of the voters, could be made more effective.

DW: The key issue is, I think, the aggregation issue. Because you can make every New Hampshire voter a blogger, which I love the idea of but you also have to make every New Hampshire voter and more into blog readers. I think the best thing that could happen is that you encourage blogging among the electorate but you also encourage local syndicates of local aggregates of bloggers. I really would like to know that the people down my street are thinking about the news that they're hearing one way or another. I'm sort of more interested in that than I am in some other random set of bloggers who aren't in my literal, my physical neighborhood. Maybe that's just me.

CL: Last question from today is: what does it tell you from all of the politics of this that AOL's version 9 is going to include blogging software for what, thirty, forty, fifty million people?

DW: I think that it means that blogging is rapidly being assimilated into the expected infrastructure, which will take some of the explicit excitement about it. But the making implicit of things is always a sign of its success. I think it's great.

CL: David Weinberger, thank you.

DW: Thank you.

Transcript by Ryan Irelan (http://www.irelan.net)

Join the discussion!