Radio, blogosphere, meme, zeitgeist

Damn. Lost my entire post due to bad pointing and clicking.

I had a nice and tidy discussion on social environments etc...

blogoshpere.
Meme.
Zeitgeist.

I am not terribly happy about this situation. Most annoying.

Anyway, my wife is plugging away at her CISCO tests... playing with router emulators and neat stuff like that.

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Well, I was wondering about what Harry Shearer mentioned on his weekly radioshow Le Show about what had happened to Nicholas Berg recently and the resultant commentary in the "blogoshpere" (he used a term like "blogsphere" instead- but who's counting?). He said that the reluctance to show what had happened to completion opened the door for speculation and conspiracy theories about the veracity of what was reported... I am studiously avoiding really talking about it because it makes be to damn uncomfortable. Notice all this linguistic twisting and turning to avoid it all... but what he said was interesting.

Many(some?) bloggers have been strongly skeptical about the reports and suggest that the footage was faked... well, that's the impression that I'm getting from Le Show. I haven't tried looking this stuff up myself and don't particularly want to.

This got me to thinking, what about our collective sense of things? Does the 'blogosphere' contain its own memes and zeitgeist, or does it reflect the senses of a wider community or society?



If you are unable to see, then the image is not very useful to you, but what I'm thinking may still be interesting. Now, the image depicts a piece of the social fabric that I deal with in a very simplified form. After twiddling with it, I've given-up being accurate to any degree. However, the idea is to make it a little easier to figure out my own question and answers to it.

Again: Does the 'blogosphere' contain its own memes and zeitgeist, or does it reflect the senses of a wider community or society?

In my current state, I'm inclined toward the latter. While there is an awful lot of incestuous interlinking of weblogs and topics, the people themselves appear to have enough social influences from beyond weblogs to make the logs themselves secondary influences- at most reinforcing previouse positions and/or preferences etc.

I think that my attempt at a graphical reference for this question illustrates this. Most people deal with more than one facet of life. We have home, work, school, family, love, politics, religion, friends of various sorts, etc.etc.etc.etc.etc... on and on and on.. what the graph doesn't show is how much variety that many people have in their relationships... it only shows that "some professionals make web pages and blogs" and "some bloggers make webpages" etc.

I'm not saying that there are no 'blog memes' but, I think they are probably less strong than some might think; especialy those in the middle of said memes.

But then memes are out there. In the wider community, "computers" are a meme that's nearly universal- "computers are good" vs. "computers and bad" etc....


Here's a meme maker- Slashdot. And here's one that's really starting to effect computers and the law Groklaw.

I'm tired and I don't feel like posting any more :P


good night!