Sarah Morgan
Want to know what the blogosphere is all about?
You. It’s about you.
The thing is, it’s all about everybody else, too.
We love blogs because we get exactly what we want with them.
If I watch the news on TV, or listen to the radio, or buy a newspaper, I get what Someone has decreed as the most important information. I get a whole lot of news and maybe within that are a couple of things that I happen to find particularly interesting.
But me? I want news about Kate Middleton, jiu jitsu, world travel and social media. There’s no news show on earth with that topic list. But my Google Reader serves it up to me every day, because I’ve been able to find a variety of blogs that address the topics that interest me.
Blogs cater to our deep egocentrism. We want people to focus on the same things that we do, and we actually want them to do it even MORE than we do so that we can learn from them.
It allows us to get knee-deep in our passions in a way we never could before. It allows us all to geek out, and we all know how much I love geeks.
On the other hand, it lets us isolate and insulate. You don’t have to see anything about the wider world anymore. Maybe this is good (a lot of that is sensationalist anyway), but maybe it gets us too separate from what’s going on with the rest of the world. A good thing to watch for.
