Posted on 08/04/2006 1:12:45 PM PDT by AmericanMade1776
The more time I spend in the blogopshere, the more it seems to me that many blogs are merely online cults.
It's an easy comparison to make. Notice, for example, that blog audiences simply do not cross over. Most people who read and contribute to Free Republic stay away from DailyKos, and vice-versa. Once in a while, some brave soul wanders over to a rival blog, as it were, and is invariably banned by the owners of that blog; more rarely, there is a full-fledged flame war in which members of rival boards virtually invade each other's territory with the goal not of exchanging viewpoints but of causing maximum damage.
Notice how this behavior is perfectly typical of what, in the real world, we call cults.
*Cult members do not leave their own cognitive and/or physical environments. Online, this means spending most, if not all, of your time in the echo chamber of blogs aligned with your point of view. This has the benefit of inoculating you from even the possibility that your position might be wrong or at least in need of more nuance.
*Cult members have no empathy for rival views or the practitioners of those views. Opponents are devils; sympathizers are angels. Orthodoxy is all-important; dissent is unthinkable.
*A cult represents organized commitment to small-picture idiocy; a gang of what Berlin called philosophical hedgehogs (those who know only one big thing about the world). Overlay this with tribal ingroup-outgroup biology and you get the inescapable conclusion that a blog, far from being a progressive community of seekers, is more often a kind of prehistoric hunting expedition determined to go after big game.
(Excerpt) Read more at line56.com ...
And I ain't clicking there...
Line 56, is an E-Business Executive Daily.
no...
Anyone know what time is the dinner for everyone who thinks like us for us to toast the demise of the devil liberal socialists?
*Cult members have no empathy for rival views or the practitioners of those views. Opponents are devils; sympathizers are angels. Orthodoxy is all-important; dissent is unthinkable.
*A cult represents organized commitment to small-picture idiocy...
(Academia in a nutshell)
Are we a blog? Wow, I learn something new every day. /s
LOL! I did! Got mine at 6:34 am.
When I think of Cults , I think of Jamestown cult
*Cult members do not leave their own cognitive and/or physical environments. Online, this means spending most, if not all, of your time in the echo chamber of blogs aligned with your point of view. This has the benefit of inoculating you from even the possibility that your position might be wrong or at least in need of more nuance.
All the MSM networks report the same stories, with the same quotes, using the same "experts."
*Cult members have no empathy for rival views or the practitioners of those views. Opponents are devils; sympathizers are angels. Orthodoxy is all-important; dissent is unthinkable.
Studies have shown that the majority of viewers who left CNNCBSABCNBCMSNBC went to Fox News Channel. The MSM lambasts FNC as often as possible, ridicules them, minimizes them, and calls their viewers uneducated.
What was the point that this author was trying to make again?
-PJ
Yeah, blogs don't have serious fact checkers like CBS News does, so you can't be sure that anything you read on one is the truth. ;)
Free Republic is a cult...
Like George Washington was only a deist.
That oughta put Demir Barlas into high gear the next time he visits Free Republic!
So much for this joint
I think you means Jonestown, right?
"Cult" is way too strong a word. The problem is that all-in forums that invite participation across the political spectrum simply degenerate into abuse of each side by the other. When there's a general understanding that the participants are on the same side -- or at least not on the opposing side -- serious discussion can begin.
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