You'd Be Flattering Yourself

Halley: “I keep reading statistics about how there are more and more blogs being written and no one is READING blogs. I think that's completely silly and not true. I read a lot of blogs.”

First, that's a straw man argument. Halley—who understands blogging—could have provided one link one study that said "zero people are reading weblogs", and then, by pointing to herself as the example, could have easily have proven the study false. But I contend that there is no such study. I contend that people are saying—quite correctly—that the percentage of people regularly reading weblogs is a very tiny fraction of those who are regular web users. The highest rated website (Yahoo!, CNN and the like) get on the order of millions of hits a day, whereas the highest-rated weblogs (Winer, Kottke, Slashdot and the like) get in the order of tens of thousands. That's chump change in Internet readership terms. A lot of people are regularly reading weblogs (and more and more of them are starting weblogs of their own), but as a percentage of Internet users, us readers and writers are a tiny minority.

But another more important objection I have is this idea that you can disprove a generalization by citing one case that goes against it. I see it a lot, like here, where d says that she didn't attract her boyfriend by having to “make out with a woman or to wear low rider jeans with a thong showing” (who ever accused d, specifically, of ever doing that?) or the emails I get saying that what I write—in general terms—about the group they belong to (or—and this is a classic—when I write something about a group which they think that I think they belong to) doesn't apply to them. Well, it might just be possible that to every rule there are exceptions, and you might be an exception, but exceptions don't disprove rules. (Exceptions don't prove rules either. Such a cliché!) I admit to making the fallacy of hasty generalization, which is fine. That's what weblogs are for. The way to disprove a generalization is to either say that the sample I'm basing it on is too small, or, better yet, come up with your own generalization which is derived from a statistically significant sample. In generalizations, the silent "all" actually means "most" or "many". Halley, in the above quote, probably means "not a lot of people read weblogs" rather than "nobody reads weblogs", but she's still wrong in disbelieving that the amount of weblog readers is in anyway significant compared to Internet users as a whole. Nuanced retorts to generalizations do not, then, take the form of "that's not true", but rather "that's true in some cases, but that's not as prevalent as you think" or "yeah, but so what?".

If, in the course of reading this weblog, you come across a generalization and you think I'm talking about you, in the vast majority of cases, you'd be flattering yourself.


Enough time passes after writing the above that I read on makeoutcity that Michael Feldman said my logic was flawed. Possibly true, but he's actually points to factual errors in the above. Fair enough. My assertion that CNN et al. got millions of hits was based on something that "I read somewhere". There were two points being made in the above, though: 1) that weblog readers are a tiny minority of Internet surfers and 2) that generalizations are not necessarily nulified by your being the exception to the rule. My intention wasn't to emphasize the first but rather the second. But while we're at it...

I've been increasingly pessimistic about the impact of weblogs and, in general, the Internet lately. They are not a panacea to the ills of journalism (at this writing, there is STILL no update on Michael's site about the fact that the site he linked to was a hoax), nor is the "unedited voice of an individual" necessarily a good thing. The speed with which unverified information (from a person I admire no less!) gets spread on weblogs can be faster than that of traditional journalism, and, if left uncorrected, can spread like wildfire. They encourage—as the Internet does in general—niches and yes, while we are able to seek out more sources of information, they also allow us to narrow our view. Sometimes, the best weblogs are the ones that tell us what we already know.