Sturgeon's Law

In debates about the "new media" in general and blogs in particular, I've often found myself reaching for an economical way to express the point that, yes, naturally, most blog posts aren't very enlightening but that's just because most stuff sucks and has nothing to do with blogs per se. Mark Kleiman tells me this is Sturgeon's Law:

All of this reminds me of Sturgeon's Law, named for the great SF writer Theodore Sturgeon, who was supposedly accosted at a Greenwich Village literary party by someone who said to him (I'm quoting from memory), "Sturgeon, how can you stand to publish in those science fiction magazines? Ninety-five percent of the stuff in them is crap." To which Sturgeon calmly replied, "Ninety-five percent of everything is crap."

Quite so. The crux of the matter is that heavy internet users are, almost by definition, people who've discovered feasible methods of tuning out the vast quantity of stuff they don't want to read on the internet and tuning in to the stuff they do want to read. People who haven't done this are, naturally, going to be appalled. Complicated tools like Digg and so forth aside, though, the easiest guide to finding blogs you'll want to read is to just find one blog you like. That blog will contain links to other blogs that provides a convenient way to sample them. And if you like one blog, it's probably that you'll like some of the other blogs it links to, and then you can go from there.

Strident blog-haters seem to me to mostly discover blogs by reading a random sample of blogs that have recent posted hostile things about something the discoverer wrote. Naturally, one's tendency is to find such fare uncongenial, and even if you richly deserve the criticism the odds favor many of your critics being genuinely not worth reading. Under the circumstances, it's easy to convince yourself that the whole thing deserves to be tuned out. This, though, is obviously the wrong way to go about things. One doesn't learn the day's news by looking at a random assortment of "newspaper articles" drawn from wherever; as with anything, you need to know what you're doing for it to be worthwhile.

Comments

That sounds exactly right.

On the other hand, it's possible to have the opposite experience. I discovered blogs when my attention was directed to TAPPED and Josh Marshall about three years ago. These led me to others, and I was amazed by the quality of the blog entries and the comments from readers. It was only as time went on that I found material of the kind cited by the blog-detractors. It was a bit like the experience I had years ago when, after a steady diet of masterpieces by Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa I saw a Japanese film that wasn't very good.

Posted by Jvallen | May 21, 2007 10:34 AM

What a stupid fucking response. The whole POINT of blogs/new publications/etc. is to SIFT OUT the 95% crap, and show the reader the good/important stuff. To the extent that an author/whatever fails to do this, to that extent the author/whatever BY DEFINITION has failed.

Imagine an MLB batter justifying his .124 batting percentage by saying "hey - that the overall average for EVERYBODY".

It's all about mendaciously picking the wrong/irrelevant comparison class.

Sheesh.

Posted by sherifffruitfly | May 21, 2007 10:42 AM

> What a stupid fucking response. The whole
> POINT of blogs/new publications/etc. is to
> SIFT OUT the 95% crap, and show the reader
> the good/important stuff.

Sorry, that's exactly backwards. Blogs allow you, the reader, to sift out the crap rather than allowing an "editor" and well-heeled "publisher" to do it on your behalf.

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | May 21, 2007 10:59 AM

Closer, especially the 2nd paragraph, but not quite.

No one but Emerson & I would say that "95% of the human race is worthless" and blogs aren't that far from representing humanity. We don't choose our partners, form our families or communities on some scale that assesses everyone not in our groups as evil or useless.

Actually the 95% of pulp content sold & had an audience, and subsidized Sturgeon & PKD. Many people glance at the political blogosphere, and don't like it. They are not wrong. That we value it doesn't say that much about the content, but about us. It is about communities and signalling, not intrinsic quality. I have always been just clicks away from Myspace music blogs, or sex blogs, or Flickr.

Broder & Kagan(s) provide a valuable service to their community (which the blogosphere has not yet completely understood), and Greenwald & MY won't replace them until...well, until the blogosphere is the power community.

Posted by bob mcmanus | May 21, 2007 12:15 PM

Uhh, if you going to use economic models as a start in understanding the blogosphere or anything else, may I suggest that "95 percent of stuff people actually buy does not have even relative value to the buyers" is not a good start?

Posted by bob mcmanus | May 21, 2007 12:21 PM

So does Sturgeon's Law therefore imply that 5% of everything is Scottish?

Posted by Nordy | May 21, 2007 12:21 PM

The trick is whether it's the same 95% for each reader. It clearly isn't for blogs, but the way Sturgeon's Law is cited usually supposes that, abstractly, that the metric and the split is universal.

Posted by Nathan Williams | May 21, 2007 12:26 PM

So, conservatives should read Instapundit and Hugh Hewitt and then they will understand the appeal of the blogsphere? There's something really wrong there. The best wonk blogs (like the Washington Monthly) are just objectively better. There are two appeals to the blogsphere -- reading other people who passionately share your same prejudices, and getting a level of analysis and discussion the mainstream media just doesn't provide. Which are you looking for?

Posted by mq | May 21, 2007 12:27 PM

"The best wonk blogs (like the Washington Monthly) are just objectively better.

...and getting a level of analysis and discussion the mainstream media just doesn't provide."

Dude, there is a world of radical feminist blogs out there, of which maybe 10% link to the hopelessly sexist and genderist mainstream blogosphere.

The communists, anarchists, Spartacists don't bother with us either.

"Objectively better" is not a term I am comfortable with, but "reading other people who passionately share your same prejudices" seems pretty accurate. I keep saying that facts, reason, arguments are just subjective preferences with questionable utility, but I don't get much traction in the political wonkosphere.

Posted by bob mcmanus | May 21, 2007 1:08 PM

The 90s music post above made me feel generationally closer to MY than I ever have.

This post entirely undid it.

The idea that someone could be as heavy an internet user as he is and only just now be discovering Sturgeon's Law makes me feel very, very old. I remember when it at least rivalled Godwin's Law, and maybe exceeded it, in frequency of invocations on usenet.

Posted by Jacob T. Levy | May 21, 2007 2:40 PM

Actually, Kleiman's misquoting. The original quote had "crud", not "crap". A lot of people, reading this, assume that it's a bowdlerization and "correct" it to the more obscene version. Also, it's ninety percent, not ninety-five.

Posted by zzedar | May 21, 2007 2:41 PM

Yes, but "Ninety-five percent of everything is crap" has long since become the "play it again, Sam" or "elementary, my dear Watson" version of the quote. It has a better rhythm, the numbers are closer to correct, and it's the crucial bit more forceful. Sturgeon said "ninety percent of everything is crud," but by triumph of mimetic survival, Sturgeon's Law is "ninety-five percent of everything is crap."

Posted by Jacob T. Levy | May 21, 2007 2:45 PM

Ninety percent of everything is crud.

Correct, zzedar.

Posted by Ted Sturgeon | May 21, 2007 2:46 PM

A little googling reaveals that the 90 percent figure is in fact much more common, though crud is far less comon than crap.

Posted by David Weman | May 21, 2007 2:52 PM

Huh. David Weman's right, and I'm wrong. I'd had a very different impression-- I remember the 95/ 90 imbalance being so much in favor of 95 that someone joked about it with a Sturgeon's self-referential-law post that "95% of all quotations of Sturgeon's Law are inaccurate."

Posted by Jacob T. Levy | May 21, 2007 4:44 PM

although i agree that the vast majority of stuff on the internet is crap, and that it's liberating and empowering to not have large media outlets dictate to me what information i need, there are some points of contention.

but in some ways i'm inclined to agree with cass sunstein's argument about the dangers of self-selection of knowledge. often what allows people to have a reasoned and rational discussion is their ability to come to the argument with a similar set of initial facts. sometimes it seems that the internet is very counterproductive to that.

more broadly, the internet allows us to filter out arguments that we do not agree with or information or perspectives that we would not otherwise choose to expose ourselves to. newspapers, etc., do not suffer from this to a similar degree.

Posted by looj | May 21, 2007 9:13 PM