Lockstep Can Be a Creative Lockbox
From cultural commentator Andrew Keen, who—though referring to bloggers—provides a good reminder about the dangers of reading and referring only to those with whom we are in lockstep agreement:
“What (Arthur) Miller would see today in the Web 2.0 world is a nation so digitally fragmented that it’s no longer capable of informed debate. Instead, we use the Web to confirm our own partisan views and link to others with the same ideologies. Bloggers today are forming aggregated communities of like-minded amateur journalists—at Web sites like Townhall.com, HotSoup.com, and Pajamasmedia.com—where they congregate in self-congratulatory clusters. They are the digital equivalent of online gated communiteis where all the people have identical views and the whole conversation is mirrored in a way that is reassuringly familiar. It’s a dangerous form of digital narcissism; the only conversations we want to hear are those with ourselves and those like us.”
—Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 54-55.
—Robbie Sagers
