This proves to me something that many others have reported: that people pick and choose what they read. When choice on the internet is so wide, the average person mainly reads the things that reinforce his views, no matter how stupid, and ignores those that challenge them.

The more generous description is that the internet age will be the age of narrowcasting. The less generous description is that it will the age of self-selected folly.

Compared to the internet, print media, television, and to a lesser extent radio, have the benefit of scarcity. These have high start-up costs and barriers to entry. The result is that, relative to blogs, a large readership is drawn to a limited number of titles or channels. With so many people seeing the world through the same window, these newspapers or broadcasting networks thus have the ability to construct a common way of understanding the world.

It's not always for the better. Totalitarian countries perfected the art, quite early on, of tinting the glass, so that more people end up perceiving the world the regime's way, than might otherwise be the case. Even in liberal democracies, there is sometimes a herd mentality among the different media so that certain points of view become legitimised through repetition more than they might deserve, rationally speaking.

Highly selective wisdom, you might call it.

But of course, there are also good newspapers that try their best to be accurate, fair and yet critical. Arthur Miller, a famous American playwright, once said, "A good newspaper is a nation having a conversation with itself."

And that's the crux. For better or for worse, the traditional media have been agents of nation-building, through their strengths in reaching masses of people. Their reach is usually co-terminous with the nation-state. Airwaves are assigned by the state while newspapers are physical goods that face logistical hurdles when crossing borders.

What happens then, when the traditional mass media with its selective wisdom loses its hegemony? When national media is swamped by trans-national or hyper-local talk? When the window to the public square is spurned in favour of the peephole into private obsessions? Do we leave behind selective wisdom only to enjoy selective folly?

* * * * *

 
Five centuries ago, in 1455, Johann Gutenberg printed a bible using movable type, the first person to do so in the West. His print run was less than 200 copies. While this may seem remarkably few to us today, it was a phenomenal number in his day. It's kind of like how most bloggers, when they first start out, are thrilled to see 200 hits.

Prior to Gutenberg's breakthrough, bibles were copied by hand. It took years to make one, and so they were rare and precious. Mostly, they were locked away by monasteries and the very rich families.

In any case, most people were illiterate, and so Christianity was a religion based on the spoken sermon. In other words, the Church hierarchy was free to interpret Christianity as it chose and disseminate that interpretation across Europe. Since the Pope in Rome had control over all church appointments, he had the means to ensure a consistent perspective.

Bear in mind that five centuries ago, Europe was a very different place. There were no nation-states. Christianity was not just a religion; it was the over-arching political order. It provided schools and education, in many places it ran the law courts, and all philosophical debate took place within its theological framework. Even kings and local princes were crowned by the resident archbishop, much like how a week ago, the Thai king lent his moral authority to anoint a general.

Then came printing, and very soon, anyone who could read was able to get his hands on his own copy of the bible. That is, ordinary educated people were able to look up for themselves the original source material.

The first effect of that was that junior and local clerics began to dispute Rome's interpretation of Christianity. The monopoly of interpretation broke down, and the Catholic Church faced a crisis of legitimacy, a period that today we call the Reformation. When its moral and scriptural legitimacy was eroded, its claim on political power and the loyalty of nobles and merchants was also diminished. This opened up political space for a re-alignment of the political order, giving rise eventually to nation-states as we know them today.

Even within Christianity as a religion, what is interesting to us is that in the aftermath of that first information revolution, there never developed a single Protestant Church. Ever since 1517, when Martin Luther first openly challenged the Pope, the Protestant branch of Christianity has been dividing again and again. Churches keep splitting from each other; new churches form all the time, even today. Groups of people interpret Christianity in their own way, quite often directly from their version of the bible or the latest celebrity preacher.

The information revolution that Gutenberg set off broke the monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church over faith and worship, but no alternative consensus emerged.

It also contributed to the demise of the old political architecture, but its demise did not lead to complete entropy. A new political order arose. However, I wouldn't say that Gutenberg's revolution was instrumental in creating the new political architecture. The space left by the knocking down of the Church was seized by kings and armies, later on by republicans and their armies, and into our present time, by marxists, capitalists, suffragettes and civil rights campaigners, to refashion the world the way they wanted it.

* * * * *

 
This example must make us ask: what happens to society --  which in our time is largely based on the idea of a nation-state -- when the internet takes more attention-share from traditional media?

Will people begin to identify less with the nation-state, and more with interests that cut across boundaries and community? Will some of us be more knowledgeable about and absorbed with the film cult Matrix, for example, at the expense of knowing anything about Singapore politics? Will others begin to identify with Chinese culture as defined and generated by China, at the expense of Southeast Asian sensitivities?

Even without the full-blown effects of the internet, we see signs of this happening. A recent survey conducted in Malaysia, polling about 1,000 Muslims found that when asked to choose one identity as topmost out of three possibilities, 73% of them chose 'Muslim'. Only 14% chose 'Malaysian' and 13% chose 'Malay'. [1]

What will happen when the internet and blogging penetrate further?

It is too early for me to attempt to answer this question. From the long perspective, the internet revolution has only just begun. In fact, it is even too early for me to suggest that the splitting of attention streams in the face of a plethora of choice is necessarily a bad thing. Maybe it is good that humans identify less with nation-states or any grand ideologies, including religion, considering how much killing and maiming have been done in their names.

Yet what happens in the internet and the world of blogging may not determine what happens in the real world. Going by the example of the information revolution from 500 years ago, a realignment of informational power may undermine an existing political order, but does not construct a new one. It may well be the reverse, in that it's the new political order that reconstructs and harnesses the informational order to suit its purposes, witness the way nation-states employ media for themselves. This impotence of the informational order by itself may get more acute if, as we're seeing today, the new information landscape is going to be one where people read to reinforce their preconceived ideas, paying no attention to that which doesn't interest them.

In such a setting, how are minds to be opened? How do we get people to see a shared societal interest that will propel collective action?

The most common reason why anyone changes his mind, or has a new take on the world, or is spurred to action, is not because anyone tells him so, but because of experience. It is when he has experienced something new, upsetting his prior assumptions, that he starts to think afresh.

As a gay person I know the power of first-hand experience. It's a known fact that the most important factor predicting whether a person holds positive or negative opinions about homosexuality is not whether he has been exposed to reasoning or arguments, but whether he has met real gay people or has friends who are gay.

Hence, if you want to push your cause, whether your interest is in migrant workers, sex workers, opposition politics, global warming, stem cell research or the preservation of Papuan languages, you have to go beyond talk and think in terms of creating shared experiences, in order to move people sufficiently.

Blogging has its uses but has its limits too. The future, now as always, belongs to those who can impact others emotionally and experientially and who can organise and mobilise, that is, to those who will seize the moment and act.

© Yawning Bread