competition vs. collaboration: events, people & ideas

An old lover of mine once told me that there are people who talk about events, people who talk about people and people who talk about ideas. Combine this with collaboration vs. competition and here is another set of axes along which we can consider bloggers.

A friend of mine conveyed a story to me of an incident when he and another pundit blogger were talking about a concept. Suddenly, they both had a look in their eyes, read clearly by each other as a battle cry to see who could blog about it first. Time and trackbacks are the classic weapons used by pundit idea bloggers. They want to get their ideas out there, validated and linked to. The pundit blogger is competing for attention, for validation, for uniqueness.

The sociable blogger talking about life is not in a race against time or for greater trackbacks. S/he knows that there are a million different perspectives, all of which are valuable. There is no one truth, only opinions. What makes an event or a person or an idea more valuable in this community is that variety of different opinions on the matter, the variety of different perspectives. Together, as a community, this brings life to something.

There are two different ways to talk about events, people and ideas and you see this played out by bloggers. Some events are discussed because each parrt of the community wants to bring life to their perspective on the matter. Nowhere is this more true than something that affects everyone differently. Take 9/11. Everyone blogged/journaled about it, each with their own voice. What was powerful was to get a fleshed out view of the event from so many different perspectives. Some events are published in competition. How many bloggers do you know who speak of a private event to prove that they were there, to draw attention to their status?

There are a variety of reasons for which bloggers talk about people. Bloggers show their respect and adoration through links to other people (or their ideas). Bloggers compete with others through similar mechanisms. In some cases, bloggers mock others to prove their self-importance, to increase their stature. The list can go on and is awefully similar to RL. Just as we name-drop in RL, we name drop on blogs.

Then there are ideas…. Blogs are a public forum. For some, they are a publishing forum. As such, people want their ideas to be unique and first. For others, it is a space to flesh out ideas and thus they put their ideas out there to be discussed, improved upon and dissected. Others put their ideas out there to help shape other known theories. The latter two approaches are collaborative while the first is very much competitive.

Anyhow, cross collaboration vs. competition with events, people and ideas and you have an interesting lens through which to consider different blog posts. Of course, most bloggers cannot be simply labeled as competitive or collaborative, but a combination of both. Still, there are trends, and this helps explain some blogging habits.

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8 thoughts on “competition vs. collaboration: events, people & ideas

  1. Ev.

    I heard it, “Small minds talk about people; mediocre minds talk about events; great minds talk about ideas.”

    Though, that may be a little harsh.

    Nice post.

  2. Halley Suitt

    Great post. Looking forward to meeting you danah so I can effectively drop your name in all the right places. 🙂 Actually just want to get into your head, up close and personal. Cheers — H

  3. Vicki Smith AKA CalGal

    This need to categorize ourselves and the things we do has some drawbacks. Am I a thinker, a relationship builder, an artist, a techie? Making up my mind, mebbe by deciding to blog in one particular way seems to limit me. I have enough places in my life where I am supposed to be one dimensional. Why would I want to do that in my blog?

    Is it a pundit thing?

  4. zephoria

    Vicki – one of the reasons that i construct classifications in this argument is to develop a structure for seeing patterns. Most people don’t fit neatly into any category, but if you start seeing posts as categorical and think about what types of posts a person tends to generate, who that audience is, what level of privacy they maintain, etc. you start to see some interesting trends. In many ways, my blog entries on the topic are me trying to flesh out these ideas, trying to think about how you can tease out the differences between people and unpack the notion of blogging.

  5. Adina Levin

    People who consider discussion of ideas infinitely superior to conversations about people are more likely to be men who have women in their lives to maintain their social networks.

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