A Reflection on the Blogging Experience

            At the beginning of this year, when I thought of blogging, I imagined the stereotypical computer geek sitting in darkness and spewing conspiracy theories onto the internet. So when Mrs. Nelson told us we’d be blogging, I didn’t think the assignments would be terribly difficult. It wasn’t until I actually tried to write the first substantive blog post that I realized that blogging isn’t a matter of simply spewing an opinion for some busy-work. Rather, it requires interaction with other sources and bloggers to clarify my point of view to both my audience and to myself.

            I approached my first blog post planning to sit down and write something about the Nobel Prizes. Needless to say, that didn’t work, so I soon found myself idly browsing other blogs, looking for ideas, and to my surprise, I soon found a post that interested me: a criticism of the Peace Prize committee for awarding the prize to the OPCW. Other bloggers had suggested that others, like Malala Yousafzai, had done more for the cause of peace than the OPCW. I kept researching this topic and reading more, and every now and then, I would try to write my blog post, only to find that I needed to research more. By the time I felt comfortable writing on the topic, I had made a very important discovery: blogging cannot be done in a vacuum, only considering one’s opinions. It requires a surprising amount of research and consideration of the ideas of others as well.

            I started my post, a defense of the committee’s decision, but I still didn’t feel like my position on the issue was completely clear to me. Nonetheless, I started writing, and I made my second major discovery regarding the blogging experience: it helps to clarify my own position. By writing my blog, I continually found flaws in my argument, and the act of writing about it forced me to address those concerns by changing my position, eventually reaching a point where I was writing a critique of the committee, not a defense. And so, I found that blogging was far from a way to stubbornly assert one’s views. Rather, it was an avenue to change one’s views, making them more intellectually rigorous.

            After rewriting and tweaking my blog post a few more times, I posted my blog, expecting to largely be done with the blogging experience. I never really considered the potentially valuable role of the comment feature. I was used to reading comments on news articles and blogs, but mainly to entertain myself with some of the displays of ignorance. In hindsight, it should have been clear to me that when a group of other bloggers, many of whom are highly intelligent, read and comment on a blog, the comments would be substantive and useful, but the thought never really occurred to me at the time.

            And so, it was a bit of a surprise when, after writing a post about how the selection of the OPCW reflected a preference for the status quo over changes, I saw a comment asking why, if the issue was important enough, a maintenance of the status quo would be, by my logic, considered less significant than a positive change elsewhere. His example was a genocide; if a genocide broke out and a group of actors maintained an international norm by stopping it, why would my logic say that those actors wouldn’t deserve the prize? I had not expected to see such a legitimate criticism of my ideas in the comments, and his comment forced me to reevaluate and qualify my position. And so, contrary to what I had expected, the discussions in the comment feature didn’t serve to only entertain me, not putting in any. Rather, they helped expose legitimate flaws in my argument and even further helped me refine my thoughts.

            My experience writing the other blog posts was similar, but the lessons I learned were most striking for that first experience. As I mentioned earlier, I expected none of this when I first sat down to write my post. I expected to sit, write a few opinions, and post. Instead, I discovered that effective blogging required consideration of others’ ideas and would help me change and refine my opinion. The sort of critical thinking, analysis, and open-mindedness that blogging requires is, I’ve found, a great fit for the Academy.

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The Internet and the NSA

Right now, we are in the middle of one of the most astounding technological changes in history. Computers have dramatically changed the way the world worked, and in the last few decades, the biggest story, arguably, has been the internet. Since its creation, the internet has served to connect the world in ways that would have previously been considered unimaginable. My favorite statistic: in 1993, the internet carried 1% of telecommunications. By 2007, the internet carried 97% of all telecommunications.

Of course, as with all changes, there are tensions that arise, and those tensions, especially this year, have been especially pronounced. One of the biggest recent stories regarding the internet has, of course, been Edward Snowden's revelations regarding the massive data collection by the National Security Agency. Whether Snowden did the right thing is beyond the scope of this blog, but there are some interesting stories of reactions to change going on in this situation.

The first major story of change is with regards to the NSA. As we previously mentioned, the nature of telecommunications changed significantly with the internet, and simultaneously, the world changed significantly with the September 11th attacks and the advent of the war on terror. In response, the government did what many would expect and consider fully rational: attempt to take back control of what they had lost. They wanted to stop the war on terror and reverse the changes against them, so over time, they began developing surveillance methods to better control their world and attempt to cope with the changes that the internet and the war on terror had brought. Unfortunately, this response to a change, like the ones we saw in the post on free trade and globalization, while perfectly rational for the government, was seen as detrimental to society as a whole, as it was construed as infringing on rights to privacy.

And there we see the second story of change, and it follows almost the exact reverse of the previous pattern. Rather than trying to take back control after a change forced them to realize they had lost it, many people are defending a change that reduced the control of ideas and freedom. To many, the changes of the internet were liberating. Now, people were able to communicate more freely, access more information, and in general, be more secure against the possibility of intrusion. In many ways, the internet was and is the "wild west." The problem, for many people, is that now, that order is being threatened, and there is a significant backlash against the NSA programs in the name of privacy and human rights. Ironically, to protect the liberating change, many people are choosing to be reactionaries and fight changes against the changes.

Those two views are ones that we have examined fairly regularly in this blog, but there is a third view that I find most interesting of all. It's the who-cares view. These are the people who accept that there is now no such thing as privacy and that the world has changed multiple times and continues to change. These people, in essence, take the pragmatic view and say that while they don't believe the increased government intrusion is right, the work necessary to respond substantially to the change is too great, and so, their response to the change is to essentially remain unreactive.