MIT Comparative Media Studies Director

MIT Comparative Media Studies Director looks at blogs as the “digital renaissance”. I just came from a dinner in L.A. with a friend who spends a lot of his time thinking about knowledge management, and got to explain the concept of blogs to him. This article does a good job of explaining the concept to the masses (a far better job than John Dvorak’s piece last week that tried to do the same thing and relegated blogs to digital vanity presses for “wanna-be writers”. Pardon me? With all due respect, John, plenty of us are the real deal. But we’re more than willing to throw the thoughts-in -progress out to be tested, evaluated, and rejected or accepted. You’re either on a dais or at a round-table. Which will it be?).

Proof that Henry Jenkins gets it?

Bloggers are turning the hunting and gathering, sampling and critiquing the rest of us do online into an extreme sport. We surf the Web; these guys snowboard it. Bloggers are the minutemen of the digital revolution.

How can you not like the image of a minuteman on a snowboard? In this time of patriotic Olympics, it’s quite the appropriate image…

Jenkins talks about the “democratization” of publishing. What I like so much about the blog concept is that it makes you part commentator, part editor – and it’s this, coupled with the interwoven nature of self-referential blogs, that create self-selecting “communities” of individuals seeking knowledge, discourse, and challenges. This continues a thread I picked up last month when talking about KM – and the possible advantages of a far more decentralized approach to sharing information (and informing the broader community).