DEMOS

The IWire's comments bit is still playing silly-buggers so I'm going to post over here. I think this is really important terrain but I'm not sure I entirely follow the thread of Will's argument. The danger of networks-as-recommenders replacing public criticism certainly makes sense to me up to a point, although it is possible to cast it in a more positive light as representing at least the partial democratisation of judgement. It is ironic though that networks are an organisational form lauded for their capacity to manage diversity yet do seem to create such tendencies towards herd-like behaviour. But I don't yet follow how that links to the distinction between lit-crit and blog-crit; in fact, i'm not sure that distinction necessarily holds up. Lit-crit has surely been deeply personal and offensive ever since the caveman at the grotto in Lascaux told his mate that his stick-man drawing was rubbish. What blogs permit is interaction, and real-time interaction, between creator and critic that other forms (of the written word at least) don't allow - the irritating "rejoinder to the rejoinder" culture that you find in academic journals and sometimes in newspaper letters' pages notwithstanding. I think it's that real-time aspect which most militates against dispassionate exchange of views and sometimes encourages things to escalate into personal hostility. I certainly do share Will's anxiety about being critical in blog postings, not least because from our experience at the Greenhouse those kinds of comments can encourage a certain degree of defensiveness or worse still complete disengagement from blogging amongst colleagues who are feeling their way into unfamiliar terrain. So I guess there is an interesting question about trust at the bottom of all this - how can we shift from the passive trust in the collective intelligence of "people like me" that underpins recommender systems to a more active form of trust that continually helps to renew and refresh the conventions and social mores (especially amongst new bloggers) that the blogosphere needs to thrive. Or am I way off the mark here? It's okay, I can take it...

I guess I didn't fill in some of the blanks, partly because I tend to end up sounding a bit pompous. What I'm really getting at is... Modern understandings of aesthetic judgement pursue an ideal of disinterested criticism of an artefact. What this means in principle is that a book is judged on its own merits, not on the reputation of the author. This basically (enter pomposity) is Habermas's argument: that in the modern public realm, an argument is judged on its merits, not on the identity of the arguer. Similarly (again Habermas), music in the modern public realm becomes divorced from place or occasion - Mozart's music is enjoyed as music, rather than because of the occasion it's marking, or who commissioned it. The problem with blogging, and with networks as a model for critique or peer review, is that the social context and the 'product' are entwined. An argument only gets heard in the blogging public realm because enough people have *already* linked to it; it comes with its own reputation. Similarly, Amazon recommends you books that others like you *already* like. Worse still, someone who regularly writes interesting stuff gets so prominent in the world of blogging, that if they cease to write interesting stuff, nobody cares because it's their identity that matters, not their content (see my analogy to jazz, linked to in the post). Think tanks suffer from a similar problem, in that their publishing/peer review model doesn't divorce content from social identity. If you write a pamphlet, you end up showing it to your friends and colleagues for comment, and while they will do their best to correct errors, they're unlikely to turn round and say "this is unpublishable" as a book publisher is professionally entitled to. Social linkage and judgement of content are confused. OK, so the world of book publishing and criticism is not true to its ideal. There are things like nepotism which corrupt it, and famous authors can get away with average novels for a while. But the point is that filtration precedes publishing, rather than vice versa, which is how the possibility for disinterested critique is possible. Does any of that make sense? If not, apologies for pouring pseudish nonsense into your greenhouse.

Ah, yes - I knew there was a quicker way of doing this... I posted this argument a year ago, Social Software as Public Enemy.

That's an interesting point but also surely over-represents the difference between the two. Publishing relies heavily, if not absolutely, on peer review before publishing (i.e. to decide what is worth publishing). And, Mozart is not simply judged in some public realm which doesn't respond to the gravitas of the name or the number of people who have exalted his work. I'm sure that Mozart is bought / listened to by a great deal more people than actually enjoy it! At a deeper level isn't it also verging on the elitist to claim that there are certain standards or criteria which can be applied to juding the merits of a piece of art that aren't / shouldn't be based ultimately on consensus?