This week Doc Searls and Chris Gulker have been trading licks over whether blogging offers a more or less accurate take on the world than mainstream journalism. If, as in the old story, the world is an elephant, then bloggers and journalists are equally blind as they pat down the same hide and try to decipher what they're holding.
Yesterday, Gulker suggested that bloggers had lapped journalists by quickly piecing together the theory that breakaway foam from the shuttle's external fuel tank had damaged the crucial heat-shedding tiles: "...I do believe that the global network and easy-to-use Weblog tools, RSS feeds etc. have fundamentally changed authorship. It has been democratized, and pushed down from the small, theoretically-highly-expert, professional cadre that were the norm in broadcast media."
I felt that he was mistakenly establishing blogging's bona fides by slamming journalism, blogging's big brother (or "Big Brother" as some would have it). And I cited The New York Times' Thursday report that NASA had ruled out the breakaway foam as not being the culprit in the crash. Warming up to my rant, I chided him that it's chutzpa to think we're so much smarter or better than traditional journalists, adding that we don't need to tear down anyone else's house to build our own.
Well, as they say, that was then.
Today NASA itself backtracked and said it cannot rule out the foam in the crash. In my haste to brand Gulker's blog-brag premature, I was, well, premature. But here's where blogs do beat non-Net journalism hands down: I can apologize immediately instead of waiting for the next edition or broadcast. Better still, I can cite my own rant as proof my original point:
Our intellectual prejudices can prompt us to fit the world to our theories, when what we need to do is fit our theories to the actual world around us. It's a constant - and very human - temptation. By revisiting the breakaway foam theory, NASA's trying to guard against that - and its own initial explanations. It's a humbling turn and one we bloggers (and journalists) should keep in mind.
10:22:32 AM 
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