And this is partly why I constantly seem to be asking myself - what am I doing here? - because I can never seem to see this leading anywhere in terms political effectiveness or "mass movement" impact on public discourse in a consistent way.
maybe the problem is we're not being patient enough. i don't think ET has to grow, for example, as much as most here seems to want, or even to have an effect on policy. it's fun to think about, but i believe, were it ever to happen, it would be serendipitous as much as structured, and would happen when the 'masses' are ready, not just when a bunch of us thought we were.
what this place works well for is to inform, educate and prepare us for change, and a more active thinking role than we are accustomed to, perhaps, a higher intellectual standard to aspire to.
as a world of ideas, the blogosphere rules, when it comes to rubber meeting the road, it's barely beginning. i enjoy seeing people here wanting to propagate better thinking to more people, especially bigger wheels, but ithink we just need to keep on keeping on, getting sharper and wiser from just showing up here. the very challenging issue of blogging with all the different nationalities represented here is being navigated effortlessly, without special planning.
we are at a natural disadvantage compared with the usa, if what we are after is growth, because of the sheer numbers on the same linguistic page. the quality of english here would be high even if all were native english speakers, for example, and yet it's anything but that way... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
It's the way self-organizing stuff works.
One suggestion I have though, is, let's get ourselves an agent. Media Planet for instance.
Or maybe not. Media Planet has a business model that uses a lot of good freelancers to create editorial content as a context for related targeted advertising. Now this sounds like an immediate switch off. But it doesn't seem to work quite as one would imagine. Their range of subjects is broad, and includes some of the issues we talk about here. I know people writing for them on business issues, and their view is that alternative views are fine - the point is to make the editorial content interesting.
What an agent does is to use their connections to the media to place stories. You can't be me, I'm taken
As you say, there is no reason why ET has to grow, and many might well prefer it as it is. Most diaries quickly get lost in the Maelstrom that is a bigger site like DKos.
However if we DO want to become a bigger and more influential site, that won't simply happen -it will require a lot of focussed effort to make it happen. And it won't necessarily happen to us - but perhaps to one of many other sites out there, or one driven by a much more business like model. "It's a mystery to me - the game commences, For the usual fee - plus expenses, Confidential information - it's in my diary..."
sez you!
i would have put the word IF in caps.
no-one here would mind if ET grew to be the FT of the new millennium, probably, but i wonder if polled, whether size matters that much to ET'ers.
i don't think its the size of the stone david threw, as much as the accuracy... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
I agree that the accuracy was vital, however the stone did kill Goliath and i doubt that many stones much smaller than, say, 2cm would have accomplished the task. ET may have the requisite size but lack the visibility. Or it may require both more size and visibility. I don't know.
In any case, melo, I enjoy your posts. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
i don't worry about ET growing, hasn't it grown well so far?
i'm concerned about over-reach, if anything, not because we wouldnìt do some good, but because it would be depressing if it didn't.
wu-wei..letting it be what it without reshaping it seems the wisest course to me. of course if people feel differently, that makes it more, not less interesting.
there's a lot of smarts here, and the agenda seems right on track for a better world. whether the world id listening deoendes more on where peoples' heads are at, rather than how persuasive we can make our model, image, whatever.
i guess i believe more in pull than push, i dunno. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
Wisdom does build up over time, it cannot happen in one discussion. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
this place is one long refined counter-argument to the CW that liberals are fuzzy thinking, disorganised, utopian bla bla.
we tear into each others' weak arguments and stop each other falling into traps of illogic, this works to keep the intellect freer from denial and cog-diss.
then we take that out into the world, info ready at our mental fingertips, toughened up by endless shoe-blogs, we can take down goliath.... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
