博客即思想

2008.04.27

很多人会以为博客是用来表达思想的，其实在很大程度上博客往往就是思想。

孤独的狂欢

90年代中期，当互联网刚开始成为现实的时候，全世界的理论家们又一下子对Marshall McLuhan这位号称是电子时代和大众文化传播理论之父的思想又很是关注了一阵。

我曾经的朋友吴伯凡兄在1998年写了一本书，叫做《孤独的狂欢--数字时代的交往》，完成了他从哲学和基督教神学研究者到网络文化研究者和IT产业分析家的转变。在这本书中，伯凡兄反复地引用和解读Marshall McLuhan的那本1964年的名著《理解媒介－－人的延伸》（Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man）。

McLuhan常常被翻译成麦克卢汉，其实这个地方h不发音，所以也有人翻译为麦克卢恩。既然如此，我觉得还不如翻译成麦克乱，因为大众传播时代的特点就是乱。Mc或Mac原意有儿子的意思，所以麦克乱是儿子乱，而不是老子乱，是小乱，而不是大乱。很多人看不惯大众传播时代的乱，觉得这样乱下去不好，纷纷到有关部门去抱怨说这样怎么得了，要求把它管制起来，就是因为没弄清楚小乱无碍，小乱有益。如果不允许小乱，大乱就不远了。

Marshall McLuhan“官方”网站链接：http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/

MBALib上关于马歇尔·麦克卢汉的中文介绍：http://wiki.mbalib.com/wiki/Marshall_Mcluhan

维基百科上Marshall McLuhan词条链接：http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan

吴伯凡《孤独的狂欢》全文下载链接：http://www.bookhome.net/baike/jingji/gddkh/index.html

媒介即讯息

McLuhan率先发明了地球村（Global Village）的概念，并且有很多名言语录。比如说Medium is the message（媒介即讯息）。关于这句话，McLuhan自己和很多人度已经进行了充分的阐述和说明，也不用我解释。

维基百科上Medium is the Message的词条链接：http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

博客即思想

McLuhan的这句话，翻译成科学网博客的进行时，就是本文的标题：博客即思想。

很多人会以为博客是用来表达思想的，其实在很大程度上博客就是思想。博客的形式决定了在很大程度上，某些思想会被传播放大，而其它更多的思想会被忽略和缩小，这和思想本身的很多性质并没有很直接的关系。

最简单的办法当然就是拿我自己的博客当例子。因为我的博客点击率一直在科学网上比较高，又没有特别不合上面规定的言论，编辑也比较喜欢推荐，所以能够一直保持点击率较高。这样，不少本来相比之下可能并不太重要的博文，如果是贴在我的博客空间上（甚至比如转帖文章，其实并不是我写的），其点击率也往往会高于科学网博文的平均点击率。这个差别其实与科学网博客早期的情形有关。当时在此开博的人比较少，新的博文很容易被关注，编辑也容易选择。现在博文无数，编辑其实已经很难选择，往往会先去看点击率较高的博客作者的新博文进行推荐。

当然，科学网博客的读者其实并没有新浪博客等大众博客那么多，所以此等情况相对来讲还没有那么严重。不过可以预期的是，越往后博文和读者越多，这种分化趋势会更强。尽管很多人会不以为然，高点击率的博客的实际影响的确会大一些。但很多人还是大大高估了高点击率博客的实际影响。

正因为对于大众媒介有一定的认识，我一开始就明确地表明自己博客中的内容和思想都是属于个人知识（personal knowledge），一方面是为了自我保护，另一方面也是为了保护我的读者。这样我自己尽量不会固执于一己之见，其他人也会去思考同一件事情的其它的可能性。

大众媒介与公众舆论

正因为大众媒介会选择性地放大和抑制思想和信息，比较明白的人应该与大众媒介保持一定的距离，不要把大众媒介流行的东西太当回事，更不能把大众媒介中的说法当成思想和知识的标准。

大众媒介的特征是在比较平常的传播层次上不会出现太大的偏差，但在特别受关注和特别不受关注的事物上面往往非常离谱，它蕴藏着巨大的危险，也是社会改良的重要渠道和难得机会。比较了解近代史的人应该明白，大众媒介加上心怀愤怒的民众，是孕育极权主义的温床，这是20世纪的教训，也是19世纪的民粹主义者所没有料到的。21世纪对大众媒介理解深刻的是本 拉登的塔利班，他们非常明白如何利用小的事件影响全世界的舆论和心理。

在读Marshall McLuhan的时候，应该同时也读读Walter Lippman的Public Opinion。按照Lippmann的精神，健康的公众舆论和有条理的信息与理解力（Organized Intelligence）是健康的公民社会和民主的基石。

维基百科上Walter Lippmann的介绍链接：http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Lippmann

百度百科上Walter Lippmann的介绍链接：http://baike.baidu.com/view/716826.htm

下面摘录了一些Marshall McLuhan和Walter Lippmann的语录。这里就以Walter Lippmann的一句话结束：

When all men think alike, no one thinks very much.

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Marshall McLuhan“官方”网站上的McLuhan语录

IF IT WORKS, IT’S OBSOLETE

Marshall McLuhanisms

链接：http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/poster.html

1. The story of modern America begins With the discovery of the white man by The Indians.
2. Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.
3. Whereas convictions depend on speed-ups, justice requires delay.
4. The nature of people demands that most of them be engaged in the most frivolous possible activities—like making money.
5. With telephone and TV it is not so much the message as the sender that is “sent.”
6. Money is the poor man’s credit card.
7. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
8. Spaceship earth is still operated by railway conductors, just as NASA is managed by men with Newtonian goals.
9. Invention is the mother of necessities.
10. You mean my whole fallacy’s wrong?
11. Mud sometimes gives the illusion of depth.
12. The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
13. Why is it so easy to acquire the solutions of past problems and so difficult to solve current ones?
14. The trouble with a cheap, specialized education is that you never stop paying for it.
15. People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.
16. The road is our major architectural form.
17. Today each of us lives several hundred years in a decade.
18. Today the business of business is becoming the constant invention of new business.
19. The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.
20. News, far more than art, is artifact.
21. When you are on the phone or on the air, you have no body.
22. Tomorrow is our permanent address.
23. All advertising advertises advertising.
24. The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.
25. “Camp” is popular because it gives people a sense of reality to see a replay of their lives.
26. This information is top security. When you have read it, destroy yourself.
27. The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.
28. One of the nicest things about being big is the luxury of thinking little.
29. Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.
30. The missing link created far more interest than all the chains and explanations of being.
31. In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses.
32. When a thing is current, it creates currency.
33. Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.
34. Men on frontiers, whether of time or space, abandon their previous identities.
35. Neighborhood gives identity. Frontiers snatch it away.
36. The future of the book is the blurb.
37. The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially.
38. A road is a flattened-out wheel, rolled up in the belly of an airplane.
39. At the speed of light, policies and political parties yield place to charismatic images.
40. "I may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt.”

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Walter Lippmann语录

来源：http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/w/walter_lippmann.html

1. A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state.
2. A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.
3. Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.
4. Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.
5. Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
6. In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.
7. In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents.
8. Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.
9. It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.
10. It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
11. Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
12. Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
13. Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.
14. No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
15. Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
16. Only the consciousness of a purpose that is mightier than any man and worthy of all men can fortify and inspirit and compose the souls of men.
17. Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.
18. Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main ballpark.
19. Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them and it is weak.
20. Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism.
21. The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.
22. The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
23. The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract.
24. The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.
25. The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
26. The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opposition than from his fervent supporters.
27. The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that  hese appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.
28. The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.
29. The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.
30. The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.
31. The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.
32. The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race.
33. There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride, they have yielded to the perennial temptation.
34. There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.
35. Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
36. We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.
37. We are quite rich enough to defend ourselves, whatever the cost. We must now learn that we are quite rich enough to educate ourselves as we need to be educated.
38. What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.
39. When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.
40. When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
41. When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.
42. When all men think alike, no one thinks very much.

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