Welcome to Gather

Are you not...forever whispering into the cosmos what all those other diaries shall forever whisper from their cupboards?

I was, I was...I am.

- Thomas Mallon, A Book of One's Own

It's harder to write something when you know people might read it. I didn't get that before. I have been a blogger for some time, publishing thoughts and photography about things personal (sometimes very personal) and public alike. With a handful of friends as forgiving readers, it was easy to put something down on a page. But what if this works? What if Gather becomes something real, something big. Then lots of people might come to see what I have to say. Many will decide to start at the beginning. These very words might shape the success of the project.

So I am second guessing every word I write. It's my third try at my first entry. Somehow, the third time you try to write something, the less real it becomes. The more you craft the words, the less they represent the thing you are trying to capture with them. I have become the artist that destroys a work by working too much on it.

And so I have decided to toss out the things I was trying to say. I won't try to be inspirational on this page. I won't try to share my vision of Gather with you in a single entry. I will simply try to be honest, here and with everything I write going forward. I will tell these stories, my stories, as I experience them. They will all be real. They will all be mine.

This, frankly, is the very reason I find the idea of what we are doing here so powerful. Modern media crafts what we experience too much. Do you remember a few decades ago, when the evening news was gospel? If Walter Cronkite said something happened, it happened. Period. You didn't question his research. You didn't debate his political bias. Cronkite said it. It happened.

Now, the right complains that "liberal media bias" dominates news reporting. The left argues that Rupert Murdoch's news machine is little more than a PR organization for the right. The trust we had in traditional media is fading because we have discovered that much of our media is not, in fact, trustworthy. It's true on the entertainment side of the house as well. Can you imagine anything less real than reality TV?

But what if we don't build a centralized, editorially-controlled, media company. What if we just start with citizen reporters, lots of them, everywhere. What if we had experts in every field, debating, discussing, and sharing knowledge on things that interest them. A thousand voices, or a million, cannot be reshaped by a media machine. That, I think, is why we have been creating and consuming blogs and podcasts at a furious rate. We want something real. We want something honest. Heck, the very imperfections that result from the lack of centralized editorial control and professional production rigors tell us we can trust this stuff.

If we simply allow everyone who wants to speak to speak, we start with a breadth of knowledge and opinion on every topic that traditional media cannot match. If we then let the community decide which of these thoughts are the best thoughts (and which thinkers are the best thinkers), we can use the community to do our editing. We can let the people select and feature the best stuff. If we then organize this thinking in a way that makes it easy to access, and give it all away free, we have an opportunity to present a more complete picture of the world in which we live. That goes for reporting on events like the selection of a new pope, the effort to transform dictatorships to democracies (whether by force or by pressure), or the restructuring of social security. It also goes for finding a darn good recipe for mushroom risotto.

That, I guess, is my hope for Gather. That you will choose to speak. That you will choose to say something interesting on some topic that you care about. That some part of the community will find what you write intriguing, engage you in learning or debate, and, together, you will move a field of knowledge forward. And we will all be better for that.

Welcome to Gather. I can't wait to see what you make of it.