“One in three U.S. children born in 2000 will become diabetic unless many more people start eating less and exercising more, a scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns. The odds are worse for black and Hispanic children: nearly half of them are likely to develop the disease…” CNN [via walker]

Rebecca Blood is concerned about what she refers to as the ‘echo chamber’ effect in weblogging, particularly of the politically flavored sort. She’s eloquent about her concerns:

…(T)hink about it: do you regularly read (and, if you are a weblogger, link to) articles and weblogs you think are dreck? Do you link to flames? Do you link to articles you find to be simply nonsensical?

I’m not talking so much about the tendency of some people to use their weblogs to put forth a political agenda at any cost; my concern is that it’s easy for the rest of us, unconsciously and quite conscientiously, to gravitate to comfortable views of the world.

The important point for bloggers is, if you don’t link to it, it is invisible from your corner of the Web. A group of bloggers that uniformly dismisses or ignores certain points of view, effectively removes them from the discourse. More importantly, the sense of pervasive shared opinion created by that clustering creates a false sense of majority. If you are interested in uncovering the truth, you won’t find it this way. If you are interested in affecting public discourse, watch out–you may gain ascendency in certain circles, but you’re just as likely to marginalize yourself instead.

She differs with those — she cites AKMA, for example — who find the restriction in one’s circle of sources and links a matter of conscious choice. “It’s usually completely unintentional.” In my case, it is quite deliberate, and I’m left wondering, with all due respect to her perspicacity about weblogging, why it is she is so concerned about confirmation bias if it is intentional. I know there is some difference of opinion in the weblog community about this, but IMHO weblogging is not journalism, and objectivity is not necessarily the virtue to which we should aspire in order to appeal to, or be of service to, our readers. In fact, as I do not hesitate to say I was quite flattered by, Rebecca included me in her book as ‘a weblogger with strong voice’ … and, by extension, strong and confident opinions. Certainly, I would not be so obstreperous if I worried more about marginalizing myself, and I sometimes do lament the fact that I am preaching to the converted, but usually I feel more that I’m writing and linking for a like-minded community, and playing a role in building and strengthening that constituency (or at least entertaining it!).

I have no difficulty screening out and ignoring opinions I am confident by this point in my moral and intellectual development are patently absurd, misguided and morally bankrupt because they diverge too much from my own well-defined and strongly circumscribed viewpoint. Making them effectively invisible from my point of view is not a concern. From my beleaguered progressive perspective, the reality of the political ‘dreck’ on the right is in our face, increasingly so, every day. And, so, there is no danger in being deluded into believing my opinions represent the majority. Rather, one of the sole comforts in a world in which George Bush has an almost-70% approval rating is knowing there are some out there who disagree with the bandwagon. I would submit that that is very different from being close-minded, which is what Rebecca seems to be fretting about. Indeed, I would turn her litmus test —

…(I)s what you’re talking about important? The more important you think it is, the more important it probably is to consider the opinions of those who have thought about the same subject and drawn a different conclusion…

— on its head. The more important an opinion is — e.g., recently, the irrationality and immorality of the Iraqi invasion — the less obliged I feel I am to listen to the nonsense coming from the other side of the argument. The weblog is not, for me, the vehicle to work out my position on such an issue; it is the consequence of having already worked it out for myself, long ago. “My mind isn’t so open that it’ll admit any ol’ thing”, someone once said.

Longtime FmH readers will recall my agonizing at times in the past that there is little opportunity in the weblogging world for dialogue with those who believe very differently from me. Both I and the political sphere have moved beyond that concern which, in retrospect, has come to seem naive on my part, given the reality of polarization in the weblogging community and the larger political spectrum. I’m not, for instance, interested in reconciliation and reasonable exchanges with the Bush ideologues; we can’t argue about our respective religions. My constituency is the vociferous opposition which I can, hopefully, play a role in growing.

Now don’t get me wrong (Rebecca or anyone else) — it would be nice if our ‘democracy’ were a civil place where breathtakingly rhetorical debates still took place. It saddens me that that is long gone in the globalized, conglomerate-media, petty-demagogue party politics of the late 20th and at least early 21st century western world. We have betrayed the possibilities of being at our best in that way, and civility and thoughtful debate will not reclaim those aspirations. It is within smaller communities — both real, local geographics ones and the virtual assemblages of like-minded people on the net — that that is still possible, and within realistic functioning communities I have far less difference of opinion with you. What disagreement there is, I hasten to add, certainly leaves room for thoughtful dialogue on these issues — I’d welcome your comments.

“From buying organic to taking the bus, Leo Hickman is trying to adopt a more ethical lifestyle – and he’s writing a book about the process. But he needs your help…” Guardian/UK [via rebecca’s pocket]

“One in three U.S. children born in 2000 will become diabetic unless many more people start eating less and exercising more, a scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns. The odds are worse for black and Hispanic children: nearly half of them are likely to develop the disease…” CNN [via walker]