Modular by Design — Weblogs and News Gathering

In 2003, an off-hand remark by then incom­ing sen­ate major­ity leader Trent Lott got lit­tle notice from the main­stream press. How­ever, weblogs got into the action, pick­ing up on the remarks and doing fur­ther research to put the story in con­text. The main­stream press picked up the brouhaha that ensued, even­tu­ally lead­ing to Mr. Lott’s res­ig­na­tion from office. How does this relate to the mod­u­lar by design approach? Let’s delve in.

While the Inter­net did facil­i­tate such dis­cus­sions, what hap­pened here was the result of a num­ber of indi­vid­u­als dis­cussing and shar­ing infor­ma­tion, indi­vid­ual units build­ing on top of the work of other indi­vid­ual units to have an impact on the way news is reported. Had the story devel­oped in the main­stream news­pa­pers, it would have taken much longer to take hold. For exam­ple, Wood­ward and Bern­stein and the rest of the Wash­ing­ton Post team worked dili­gently on the Water­gate story for 26 months and because the main­stream press gen­er­ally looks for val­i­da­tion from their com­peti­tors in the guise of follow-on sto­ries (what one could call either pack men­tal­ity or group think), they often had to check and recheck that they were head­ing in the right direc­tion. Granted, the secrets being uncov­ered in that case were not part of the pub­lic record but one can argue for the advan­tage of a larger group communicating.

In the weblog world, ideas and sto­ries are either debunked or improved in with greater veloc­ity over time. If one treats the meme as the most basic mod­ule of a thought, blogs pro­vide a uni­verse where a meme’s veloc­ity increases over time, often forc­ing the main­stream media to play catch-up with the blog­gers. The power of many is greater than the power of an indi­vid­ual but in the begin­ning is an indi­vid­ual idea or story. For exam­ple, Nova Spi­vak recently tried an exper­i­ment to see how quickly a meme could prop­a­gate and showed in the process that this par­tic­u­lar item spread to nearly 740 weblogs in less than 3 days.

Tak­ing into accounts Metcalfe’s law which states that the value of a net­work increases expo­nen­tially with every new mem­ber in the net­work, the mod­u­lar approach to com­mu­ni­ca­tion can have a tremen­dous impact. Because weblogs are indi­vid­ual mod­ules, they can­not be con­trolled as a group. For exam­ple, a par­tic­u­lar orga­ni­za­tion can be denied access to infor­ma­tion but a wider group is harder to con­trol. Once again mod­u­lar­ity works to one’s best advantage.

How should the main­stream press deal with this new effect? The answer is some­what counter to cur­rent think­ing in that the only way one can fully mine a mod­u­lar model is by part­ner­ing one’s mod­ule with oth­ers. This means work­ing in con­junc­tion with one’s com­peti­tors in order to get a greater advan­tage for every­one involved.