Can You Trust Bloggers?

I read about an interesting social experiment in college. A college class was told that a Professor from a neighboring university was coming to give a guest lecture on the possibilities of life existing on other planets. The speaker came, and gave some measured, reasonable arguments as to why this could be so.

Then, another class was told that one of the building’s custodians had been studying about the possibilities of life on other planets, and that he had asked to come in and give a lecture about it. Then, the same speaker, behaving the same way, delivered the same lecture again.

The results? When polled, the class that had believed him to be a Professor was 80% more likely to be open to the possibilities of extraterrestrial life. The class that believed him to be a custodian, however, was barely swayed. Their likelihood of being more open to extraterrestrial life swayed around 20-30%.

The study tells us some interesting things about human nature. We’d like to believe that we’re rational beings, and that we examine arguments and opinions by their individual merits. But in reality, characteristics of the speaker usually have as much or more to do with what we listen to. We look at clothing, body language, confidence and tone of voice. When it comes to examining the world, we look for authority figures and experts. Listening to people can have more to do with trust than it does with critical thinking.

That could be part of the reason some people are suspicious of what they read on the internet. In many cases, what worries them the most could be whether or not who wrote it qualifies as an authority.

Ideally, if you’re knowledgeable about the subject at hand, you should be able to determine whether or not the person you’re reading knows what he’s talking about pretty quickly yourself. But a lot of people want to know more about the speaker before they judge an argument’s value as an intellectual short-cut. Whenever possible, people want to classify others by their position in life, and shape their takes on what they say and do through those filters.

For a long time, doing that was tough on the net. In theory, people of every race, creed, age and color should appear equal. But as people become more net savvy, there are new distinctions being made. People are realizing that not all web pages are created equal, and that some websites carry more clout than others. They can’t judge you by what you look like, but they can judge you by where you are on the web, and blogs are on a pretty low rung.

I usually write about Japan and stuff that isn’t that controversial, but every once in a while I do an opinion piece, and a couple times I’ve gotten linked to at discussion forums (they probably found them on digg). When I check out the back-links I go in thinking everyone must love the article if it got linked, but it’s usually more of a mixed bag.

It’s interesting seeing some of the replies further down the threads by people that read my post and disagree with it. Sometimes they don’t argue against what I wrote that much. Rather than talking about the argument itself, they just bring up the fact that it was on a blog, as if that in and of itself discredits it, and use phrases like “what is it with these bloggers?”, like everyone in the world who has a blog gets together and decides what to write about and how.

The thing is, in a day and age when almost everyone under 40 has a net connection, it’s pretty difficult to typecast people who write blogs. Like people, you have to judge them individually. There are as many blogs out there as there are topics and walks of life. My favorites are written by a music journalist in New York City, a former white house aide, an English teacher in Tokyo, a guy who works at Wal-Mart, and an assortment of people who as good as they are at what they do don’t seem to do much of anything but post on the internet.

None of these people have much in common in terms of their walks in life. In most cases they don’t even write about the same things. The one thing that links them is that I find what they write really good and interesting. In most cases I didn’t know anything about their personal lives or credentials when I started reading them. It was just a matter liking what they delivered. In many cases, they were writing better stuff than anything I could find in the traditional media covering the same topics. Not because people doing news out of the traditional media are inherently better, but just because there are so many people blogging that if you use your judgment you can eventually find some great stuff out there.

Of course, if someone makes factual claims, for example, states that Barack Obama was educated at a radical Muslim school, that could involve them having some inside information you don’t, and trust is involved. But those concerns aren’t always as important when it comes to giving analysis, or examining current events. If the writer’s arguments are well thought out, and they link to the relevant evidence to support their claims, is whether or not they’re a “blogger”, or anyone else for that matter, really that important?