The Blog Echo Chamber in Action

It is interesting to follow the chain of referrals when a hot story goes through the blogosphere.

The original article is from Ken Fisher at Ars Technica. Read the money quote:

NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank-robbing when it should be doing something about piracy instead.

"Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned," Cotton said. "If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year." Cotton's comments come in Paul Sweeting's report on Hollywood's latest shenanigans on Capitol Hill.

Susie Madrak at Suburban Guerilla cited Ars Technica. Lance Mannion cited Susie Madrak. And Avedon Carol at The Sideshow cited Lance Mannion. Neither Lance Mannion nor Avedon Carol appeared to follow the chain of links to the source.

Why not do a modicum of checking, at the very least to get a sense of the context in which the original quote appears?

This sort of linking at a distance makes sense to me only if what one is trying to do is not directly link to an objectionable source, e.g., if you don't people to be able to get from your blog to a hate site or a porn site or whatever sort of site it is that sinks your boat. Otherwise, you are adding to a chain of interpretation that becomes less and less about what was originally said.

Last week I got my moment in the sun and 8,000 extra visitors when Avedon, late-night guest-blogging at Eschaton, pointed to what I wrote about Sidney Blumenthal's Salon piece on character references for Scooter Libby. But there's something a tad incestuous about this: It was Avedon who pointed me to the Blumenthal piece. Her hook was the Manchurian Candidate reference Blumenthal used as his lede. My hook was how Paul Wolfowitz can't seem to do anything right -- to which Blumenthal gave more column-inches and seemed to me to be the point of the article.

My sense of how blogging should work is that we should all be linking to the Blumenthal piece, and maybe commenting why. Perhaps the explanation should say why and whether a net-surfer with arbitrary interests would want to follow the link. Not everyone is a Digby, but I rather think that adding something -- a new angle, a different point of view, a connection to some other idea -- makes a better post than just picking up someone else's link.

And I continue to think it is a good idea to get off the beaten track to find content to inject into the blog conversation.

But who knows? Maybe these chains of referrals and multiply recursive links are the firing of the synapses of the blogospheric group mind. If so, it's interesting to consider that we're watching in a way, the thought process of something greater than ourselves.