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Uncle's Help |
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Gregory Morris, 1/30/08 3:49:58 pm |
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Uncle suggests somehow unifying to pro-gun element on the internet.
There is a pretty good discussion going on in the comments right now, but let me continue my early thoughts here. First, my original comment:I’ll step outside the box here for a second and disagree with your implied hypothesis that a "unified coalition" of interwebified-gunnies would be a good thing. The power of the internet lies in the network of independent nodes rather than central power. Sometimes the nodes can be harnessed to work in parallel, but they can’t and shouldn’t be synchronized. This is because the internet’s culture is define by more by trends than actual organized groups. Things come and go too quickly. Too many people have too many disparate beliefs. The power still exists, but it is distributed. In fact, I would argue that centralizing it would diminish what power currently exists within this disordered amalgamation.
When I suggested that "nodes can be harnessed to work in parallel", I didn't necessarily mean by a central body/site. Certain issues will simply cause a temporary unification and "call to arms" due to the internet "mob" dynamic that already exists. Digg takes that concept and runs with it. The question is, can we create something gun-centric that operates on the same principal as digg? I'm not so sure. Ace uses the barbershop quartet example, but I'm not sure that's a particularly good example. Comparing 4 or 5 people to thousands is like apples and oranges when you are discussing information dynamics. However, comparing the numbers of fellow gun enthusiasts to the entire digg user base is also not accurate.
Frankly, I think the information dissemination component works very well as-is. One blogger links to another who links to another. Readers follow the links. The information is disseminated to everyone who is interested. The reason bloggers are always 5 days ahead of the NRA is because the NRA has a bottleneck. Think about the disorganized graph topography of the blogosphere versus a top-down topography of a monolithic organization... In a network, any outage or anomaly can be routed around. No bottleneck. The blogosphere also reduces redundancy without eliminating it, which creates a system that runs at near-optimal efficiency.
The other component we are considering is actually calling the recipients of information to action, and coordinating that action should the need arise. That happens in a small way with the existing, distributed network of blogs, but in a large way with gun organizations like the NRA, VCDL, et. al. When the NRA says "write your congressman", people do. When the VCDL has a rally, people attend.
So what do we really need? I can't really answer that. It is amazingly good, as-is. All I can think of is a browse-able gun-centric archive of links where people can go to research specific topics. Perhaps something like the Second Amendment Carnival, only perhaps more organized/categorized. Billianter suggests an index where you can find everything in one place... I currently call that "Google". |
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