I constantly tell my students that they are way way way more than just their personal voice. Yes, there are two distinct levels: individual (blogger) and cultural (blogosphere). And each blogger is for sure a person and for sure has her own words and her own personality. But you’re doing bloggers — especially the neophyte — a disservice when you suggest that they’re not a medium.

The blogosphere is a medium — a very powerful tsunami of individual voices (individual ants) that in unintended consequence have created an emergent pattern, an emergent voice — the passion chamber, if you get my drift from Naken Conversations — that is “a mass, not a monolith, not even a medium.”

You can call an AP stringer just a person, a voice. But, if thst stringer is picked up and repeated and replicated (and we all know that there is zero discernment between AP stories and NYTimes stories, sadly) then that single voice can simple change brand and cultural perception.

The single voice is not alone. That single voice is Kosmos.

Hear the difference? Russia Russians, America, Americans, Blogosphere, Bloggers. Stay with the first word in each case and as you propose, Jeff, the individuals are gone. We’re just one mean machine–a faceless body of text.

I too agree with Easton

I just think it’s naive to assume that everyone understands it to mean the same thing, or that all blogs somehow agree with one another or follow some mystical rules of physics that apply universally in some sort of collective entity.

But I suspect it goes even further.

Often when folks face things they don’t understand, they look first for the differences — particularly the differences, they cannot explain or those that they fear. Then they group and label them. That very act offers a feeling of control.

On the other hand, we *wear the t-shirt* that says *I’m in the blogosphere.* so that we know who’s in the club and who’s not. Another very human response to something new. It’s how we tell each other who we are. Do we ever get out of high school?

Maybe next time I’ll just say “punditry” . That’s a joke. K?

” There is no need to argue whether a collective is the sum resulting from the addition of its elements or more, whether it is a being suigeneris, and whether it is reasonable or not to speak of its will, plans, aims, and actions and to attribute to it a distinct “soul.” Such pedantic talk is idle. A collective whole is a particular aspect of the actions of various individuals and as such a real thing determining the course of events.”

(, p44)

Yes, there are some emergent results which can be ade singular, but these actions are the product of multiple individual interactions on a lower level. The issue with older media is that these institutions are used to focusing on the singular mass product of many individuals (a newspaper, a television station) as opposed to focusing on the many mass products of individuals interacting within a complex network.