Leaders, because of those who follow

Frederick Turner, at Tech Central Station, weighs in on the blogosphere's newfound power. [cue dramatic music] This power was demonstrated to an extent few would have predicted in the whole Ra^therGate mess.

CBS announced that it had uncovered documents that showed George Bush had been derelict in his duty. Then CBS made its big mistake: It posted the documents on the Web.

Within hours, these documents were being picked at by experts in any number of fields, ranging from typography to military procedures to the history of the National Guard to what address George Bush would have used at the time the memos were written.

The documents, which Dan Rather stated had been thoroughly vetted, and which came from an "unimpeachable source", were revealed to be fakes. At last, CBS fell back on the statement that the documents were not genuine, but the information they contained was true.

Leaving aside the gaping logical flaw in this statement, I'll merely note that five years' quest for anything to get Bush research wound up being thoroughly fact-checked and discredited in a matter of hours. This is the kind of processing power most research departments can only dream about.

With this success under the collective belts of the bloggers, the blogosphere has awakened to its power, and read the work of F.A. Hayek with new insight and recognition. Nevertheless, Turner has his concerns:

So two centuries of centralized knowledge-dissemination are now coming to an end. The Public, which was once the state's final arbiter of truth, has revived after its long subordination to the media elite, and seen itself, and started to flex its muscles. ... But with power comes responsibility. The blogosphere needs to live up to it new duties. When this election is over, and the partisan furies temporarily placated, perhaps the bloggers of the left can join the bloggers of the right in the pursuit of fact and reason.

First of all, let's hope that the bloggers of the left and right, and of any other axes that have been proposed, can get together. This is essential for the health of the blogosphere. Indeed, if one point of view is excluded from the blogosphere, it will doom it as thoroughly as CBS has been doomed by its exclusion of any viewpoint too close to the center. A blind spot will eventually swallow something critical, and down comes the whole show.

That being said, power and responsibility do go together, but in some cases, it can be hard to say which is cause and which is effect. In an essay on The Witches' Voice, I tackled the subject of leaders.

One kind of leader, which is the only kind that has any real power in a community as chaotic as the NeoPagan community, is the kind who is a leader because people choose to follow. Such a leader does not have followers because he is a leader, he is a leader because he has followers. And if the followers see the leader as no longer worthy to lead, they will find someone else to follow.

(Leading NeoPagans has been likened to herding cats. Well, it's easy to herd cats -- if you're a mouse. The trick is surviving the process.)

The public has fallen away from network news because they have come to recognize that it is unworthy of following. The main advantage of the Internet, of Cable News, and of the blogosphere, is that these outlets have given the public someone else to follow. But by increasing the number of choices available, they have also caused the public to become more discerning.

Failure to live up to the responsibility of a leader will result in that status being revoked, in a very spontaneous, but very orderly, fashion.