The Generosity of Blogs

Mike Sanders admits — oh the shame of it! :) — that he has at times ego-surfed. He poses the useful question: Is vanity at the heart of blogging? (Mike’s answer is a resounding No.)

I agree with Mike. Blogging is by its nature generous. As RageBoy has pointed out, blogging occurs within a network if not an actual community. Weblogs were, in fact, originally a way for individuals to filter and recommend other sites. They’ve expanded their nature, but the prototypical blogs — Doc’s or Dave’s, for example — are full of references, recommendations and reflections. Pointing people away from your site to others is an act of generosity much frowned upon by the Commandants of Stickiness who run most commercial sites.

The generosity of weblogs is a reflection of the generous nature of the Web itself. Without links, there is no Web. Its very architecture is hyperlinked. Or, more exactly, since hyperlinks aren’t an accident of nature, the Web’s nature is generous. In fact it’s an architecture of hope. (More on this in my upcoming book, heh heh.)

Now, one could say that bloggers put together rich sets of links and recommendations because they want readers to like their blogs and thus they are ultimately selfish. You could say that about every human action … and is there a college freshman who hasn’t said exactly that? Mother Theresa, Albert Schweitzer and Mahatma Gandhi were all supreme egoists by this criterion. But we’re much more complex than that. If you reduce all human motivation to self-concern, you not only miss everything that makes life fun, you also lose your ability to discriminate self-sacrifice from self-indulgence…but maybe that’s the point.

[Others responding to Mike: Tom, Doc, Jeneane Jennifer.]

Categories: Uncategorized dw