Old Cognitive Dissonance

David continues the discussion … in response to my notion that even if nobody reads me, I succeed …

The problem I see is that a major benefit of blogging is the opportunity to get diverse feedback for your thoughts and diverse access to the thoughts of others. If, in fact, you are the only one blogging there is no benefit beyond writing out your thoughts in a file on your own computer.

And Rovy provides his operationalized definition of the Long Tail

In other words, the critical mass is the entire population in the curve, including those on the high-end (most popular blogs) and those trailing out near the end of the tail (with few readers, like me).

We’re all on the same page here, I think. We’re just weighting the paragraphs differently.

Yes. There’s value in the feedback, but I disagree that there’s no incremental value of placing the blog in public even if nobody’s reading. When I write to a potential audience, I write differently. I tend to use punctuation differently. My sentences aren’t always GOOD sentences but I try to put them in some logical sequence. Sure nobody’s reading me NOW .. but when I’m rich and famous, perhaps they will and I don’t wanna let on that I was really a dolt back in the old days. I don’t know that this is a conscious process of evaluation, but knowing that the writing is in a public space and might potentially have a reader some day makes me approach it differently than the journal I have on my laptop.

And, yes, it would be a lot better if there were more people engaged few-on-few so more conversations were happening. It would mean a richer stew providing more intellectual nourishment for us all.

But we’re still out about 2.5 sigmas above the mean for adoption of this technology. Even those who identify themselves as experts and professionals in the field (like AECT) have not yet adopted this technology en masse. We’re looking for 16% adoption to hit the inflection point in the normal distribution and we’re only at about 7% now for blog writers. People who read blogs have already passed the 25% mark (Pew Study) .

Which goes back to my earlier post about potential readers. Just because they’re not writing, doesn’t mean they’re not reading. The audience is out there and it’s growing.

Walking the Walk

The bigger question about adoption, tho, (and my main issue relative to AECT) is “Who is adopting?”

The AECT’s mission statement says

The mission of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology is to provide international leadership by promoting scholarship and best practices in the creation, use, and management of technologies for effective teaching and learning in a wide range of settings.

and some of the proposed revisions of that indicate that some portion of the membership believes that AECT is a home for the very best applied technologists in the world. Yet the adoption rate for people writing blogs is probably smaller than the average. My whole “wrong side of the divide” rant was about that very issue.

I’m sympathetic with the causes. The demands of school, P&T, and all that are huge. And I don’t expect everybody in AECT to write a blog — altho I would expect them to read some now and again. Even back in the DAVI days, I suspect not everybody could thread a 16mm projector — or even understood why they should. There’s no reason for everybody to tackle every technology.

All that aside, it remains my contention that blogs and their ancillary technologies (rss, aggregators, and tags) are fundamentally changing the web. The AECT doesn’t appear to get it. The important question is “why?”

So far I’ve got three hypotheses:

a. They’re so mired in using paper journals to support practice, the new technology hasn’t impinged on their worlds yet (unlikely given the level of adoption for people who read blogs).

b. They’re so mired in the minutiae of day-to-day that there just isn’t time (a rationalization, but still an obstacle).

c. They’re afraid to write something that hasn’t been vetted first because they might appear foolish or unprofessional (I’ll call this one “stage fright” and the main symptom is the question “why would anybody want to read anything I had to say?”).

So we have an opportunity in the AECT to help people over all these hurdles. The question is “How?”

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 27th, 2005 at 7:36 am and is filed under AECT, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.