Thursday, March 8, 2007

Athens or Babel?

This is from an interview this morning with Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, on the Brian Lehrer Show, WNYC. I am paraphrasing by memory, so any inaccuracies in quoting are mine.

The internet--the blogosphere--will play out in one of two ways. Either it will become a platform for a great experiment in Athenian democracy where everyone has a part, or it will become Babel and will split apart entirely into disconnected voices without a shared language. What will determine this is how strictly people seek out only those voices that reinforce their own.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just the other day I mentioned to someone that studying the phenomenon that blogs are quickly becoming could be a GREAT thesis. Take the case of Baby Noah. Noah came into the world on June 10th and due to a very strange disease, he left the world on January 12th. Through the course of the whole process, his mother maintained a blog that ended up reaching over 25,000 people across 25 countries.

Aric Mayer said...

I am very sorry to hear that little Noah was in this world only for such a short time. I wished him and his family well.