Peenie Wallie

Sharks are one of nature’s most perfect predators. They evolved over millions of years into perfect killing machines. Sharks have no known predators, except for other sharks. Interestingly, they have to swim constantly, or they die.

Many people have an irrational fear of sharks. My daughter said that sharks are “bad” and “mean”. But I told her that sharks aren’t inherently “bad” or “mean” or “evil”. They’re just hungry. They are basically swimming appetites with teeth. And, if we stay out of the ocean, the odds of being attacked by one are next to nil.

The sharks live in the same oceans with their prey, schools of smaller fish. The little fish don’t like the sharks, but they understand that they’re not going away any time soon either. So, the fish learn to stay alert at all times. They try not to do stupid things that would single them out for unwarranted attention from the sharks.

The blogs are a very interesting phenomena. For good or bad, the blogs clearly have a propensity to operate with a mob mentality.

It’s true that, when there is blood in the water, the blogs do have a tendency to go into something akin to a frenzy. There are some facets of the process that are somewhat disconcerting. Once they reach a certain critical mass, in their collective actions, they do tend to resemble a frenzied mass, not unlike a swarm of killer bees, school of sharks or piranhas in a feeding frenzy, or a mob of people.

By this I mean that, there is clearly a competition occurring in the nucleus of the blog. People want to get their story on the web first…post the most insightful comments…collect quotes to support their assertions…link and trackback as much as possible…cover the best angles…etc. The blogs that will get the most hits will be those that make the most posts with the most references with the best summarizations of the other posts, etc. So, there is clearly this clarion call to arms once the blood is in the water.

Furthermore, it is impossible to strike back at the blogs. You can only answer their allegations or stick your head in the sand, but you cannot strike back at the blogs. The reason is that they are too numerous and they operate independently. By the time Eason Jordan resigned, there were thousands of independent blogs all chanting in near perfect cacophony. “Release the tapes. Release the tapes.”

Trying to say that the blogs are backed by this group or that group is fruitless, as is saying that they are rank amateurs, with no journalistic integrity. You’re just shouting into the wind. There is no one accuser that can be singled out, prosecuted, or exposed to stop the bleeding. In the end, the charges must be answered to, or you must be prepared to suffer the consequences.
In the final analysis, it really doesn’t matter who owns and operates the web sites. Whether each one is backed by liberals or conservatives, gays or heterosexuals, Catholics or Jews. All that matters is that, their charges must be answered to.

Emergent Behavior

The blogs behave as efficiently as they do, not by some grand conspiracy of design, but as a result of “emergent behavior”; behavior that arises in complex systems, that isn't readily explainable by the individual properties of the components. In 1984, no one knew that everyone would have a computers within 10 years. In 1993, no one knew that every computer on earth would need to be wired together in a global network. In 1997, no one knew that everyone on earth yearned to be posted their stories on the internet. And in 2000, no one was predicting the rise of the blogs.

The blogs are clearly a product of “emergent behavior”. When a non-trivial number of people start posting and cross posting stories on the internet, the phenomena that arises is infinitely more than the sum of the individual components. As the number of participants in the blogs increases, the resulting phenomena assumes properties that were not forseen. . The blogs are a self-correcting, multi-tasking, multi-threaded, massively multi-participant, online, real-time application.

That they behave similarly to complex systems found in nature was is not necessarily expected, but nor is it necessarily surprising. The fact that the behavior of the blogosphere in its excited state closely resembles an agitated swarm of bees or a school of feeding pirahanas to me means that the blogosphere has evolved to operate as efficiently as other complex systems have. It has realized a new point of equilibrium, that was not entirely predicted. It took the sharks millions of years to evolve. The blogs achieved the same result in a few short years.

The less for the MSM? Learn to live with the blogs, because they’re looking more and more like a school of perfect predators that aren’t likely to be going away any time soon. Maybe it’s time for MSM to start studying the lifeforms further down the food chain to crib from their techniques of survival.