political blogging
All blogging is political it seems. Or not.
I met with Tim Ireland, the other night, in London. In many a way he’s one of the most influential political bloggers in Britain, writing about the Sun, current affair and, ehr, MPs blogging. He gave me food for thought on the nature of blogging, i.e. what makes it different, and its possible effect on the political system.
In the first respect, he was saying that its’ all about trust, transparency and the distribution of social intelligence. By that meaning, a blogger’s influence is function of her capacity to build an argument which is based on demonstrable evidence, and stands the test of other bloggers’ scrutiny (and the public as well). In this way a blogger builds trust, or reputation, and authority with that. Transparency ir required to coalesce this process, at different levels: IP, content, personae. That is you need to know where your traffic and comments are coming from, the author of posts/comments and where the evidence is to support an argument.
This has consequences for politics and to some extent also democracy. Well, we agreed that it does, in four overlapping respects. First, blogging is a form of glorified, old time journalism, by which the truth emerges most of the time from research, testing and critical, peer assessment. Second, blogging is a collective exercise in online deliberation, as bloggers come together as a public online. They judge other bloggers on the grounds of the evidence presented through rational scrutiny, and challenge authority with authority. Plus, on the Internet nobody knows you are a dog-blogger. Finally, this process leads to the collectivised and bottom-owned articulation of social intelligence, by which new meanings are built and new structure of knowledge, and power, created. Finally, related to that, blogging is a great campaigning toll, which exploits citizens’ apathy and laziness, and is thoroughly embedded in search engine dynamics. It comes down to who comes up. And this is crucial for political campaigns.
Of course each of these models has flaws and each complements the others. But enough for now, I’ll need to take a deep breath and think about what I just said. I’ll leave it for tomorrow.
And this is not quite the terms in which we’ve discussed it, rather an academic rendition of the chat we had. Tom Watson chimed in briefly at the meeting, but I reckon he was too bored by blog-academic spiel to stay for long. Which sort of makes sense, as the ‘chat’ was 3-hours long; most of the other stuff from the meeting will be coming out, Steve Ward and I hope, as a research note for our research project. Well, thanks Tim, much appreciated.
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January 17th, 2005 at 1:43 pm
Why should weblog-based political dialogues be completely free of the usual kinds of power-based bias, Wainer? If Joe Bloggs posts something interesting on his unknown blog is it really as likely to be read and discussed as if Harry of Harry’s Place did the same thing?
At least two readings about the issue of power in computer mediated communications spring to mind - Postmes, T., R. Spears and M. Lea (1998) “Breaching or Building Social Boundaries? Side-Effects of Computer-Mediated Communication”, Communication Research, 25 pp. 689-715. and Crawford, A. (2002) “The Myth of the Unmarked Speaker” in Critical Perspectives on the Internet, (Elmer, G. ed.) Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Md., pp. 89-104.
The abstract for the former says:
“Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is sometimes heralded for its power to break down social boundaries, and to liberate individuals from social influence, group pressure, and status and power differentials that characterize much face-to-face interaction. We review research conducted within the framework of the social identity model of deindividuation effects (SIDE) demonstrating that this is not always the case. When communicators share a common social identity, they appear to be more susceptible to group influence, social attraction, (self) stereotyping, gender-typing and discrimination in anonymous CMC. While CMC gives us the opportunity to traverse social boundaries, paradoxically, it can also afford these boundaries greater power, especially when they define self and group identity.”
January 18th, 2005 at 12:10 pm
Good point David. But I think nowhere in the post I mentioned free-ness from traditional power! On the contrary, blog hierarchies stratify over traditional media hierarchies, and traditional players yield considerable power in the blogosphere. Neither I said, nor did Tim for that matter, that Joe Blogg’s site is as likely to be read as, say, iBBC fora. Political blogging require skills and dedication; however readership is determined by an interplsy of factors _including_ peer review, acquired reputation, links in links out, serac engine results etc which can be pursued without a traditional media base. I would say blog benefit from what Margett’s identified as the three main incentive for the growth of the ‘virtual’ party: nodality (that is networking), competition and low access costs.
Thanks for the refs, I read the first, I’ll chase the second.
October 2nd, 2006 at 11:16 am
Hi everyone! I just wanna say that politics is a favorite subject matter of all peopleĀfrom youth to elders. When it comes to the topic of Politics, each individual is anxious to speak his mind and so are squabbles that are ready to explode. For all we know, Swiss politics has been silent in the global village; whereas U.S. and Asian politics are so alive. On the contrary, Swiss politics is also an extraordinary hotspot of debate and a favorite past time of each opinionated Swiss inhabitant.