Jane Friedman's blog article
12 must read Articles from 2011 are true must reads. The first article on her list is
Accessibility vs. access by Maria Popova in Nieman's Journalism Lab. Blogger or as Popova calls them "information curator" can be seen as information cross pollinator who reaches to collect information then carries it back out to the hive.
She says it beautifully
"Knowledge is not a lean-back process; it’s a lean-forward activity. Just
because public domain content is online and indexed, doesn’t mean that
those outside the small self-selected group of scholars already
interested in it will ever discover it and engage in it." and "Information curators are that necessary cross-pollinator between
accessibility and access, between availability and actionability,
guiding people to smart, interesting, culturally relevant content that
“rots away” in some digital archive, just like its analog versions used
to in basement of some library or museum or university"
The difference today is there are a lot of folks out scrounging around in those dark corners and dusty boxes full of odds and ends. But I have agree with Popova that with all the information available there may be a barrier of motivation.
She puts in nicely, "
The relationship between ease of access and motivation seems to be
inversely proportional because, as the sheer volume of information that
becomes available and accessible to us increases, we become increasingly
paralyzed to actually access all but the most prominent of it —
prominent by way of media coverage, prominent by way of peer
recommendation, prominent by way of alignment with our existing
interests. This is why information that isn’t rare in technical terms,
in terms of being free and open to anyone willing to and knowledgeable
about how to access it, may still remain rare in practical terms,
accessed by only a handful of motivated scholars."
I had not thought of blogger as "editor" before. Popova's interview in
Brain Pickings with Eli Pariser about his book "The Filter Bubble", he makes a interesting point.
"The primary purpose of an editor [is] to extend the horizon of what
people are interested in and what people know. Giving people what they
think they want is easy, but it’s also not very satisfying: the same
stuff, over and over again. Great editors are like great matchmakers:
they introduce people to whole new ways of thinking, and they fall in
love.”
Pariser conclusion as a way to overcome the herding of what we learn by the filters of search sites like Google is to behave randomly, follow whims and tangents, "roads less traveled". The filter algorithms are forced to expand. It is the roll of us and the roll of editors to help.
