Anyhoo, TigTog writes:

“My own interest here is how might political parties more effectively engage people like I was a few years ago: moderately politically aware and opinionated, but without much detailed policy knowledge etc for using in rebuttals of other political arguments. Reading political blogs is what radicalised me politically, made me seek more knowledge about political maneuvrings, and has made me actively seek to shape political discourse as much as I can.”

Yeah, ditto on that. And I daresay it wasn’t so much _reading_ political blogs but rather being able to engage with them and their readers in dialogue that was the stimulating factor. Would that be right?

But to link back to an earlier point you made about the power of privately sponsored partisan websites - I wonder where a grant or some seed funding might be found to start such a thing? Anyone have any ideas? I’d love to see a hub where policies were compared and contrasted as well as discussed. Non partisan would be neato, but partisan would be cool and probably easier to find someone to pay for.

Most of the folk who visit my blog are Americans and they seem to be in great fear about what their government can do. Given that our Government seems to be closely allied with America, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that, if Howard is re-elected, it could follow suit. Registration of bloggers is definitely a possibility.

Regarding the move by the Government into blogging: once it realizes the potential that it offers to influence opinion, well…read 1984!

My own interest here is how might political parties more effectively engage people like I was a few years ago: moderately politically aware and opinionated, but without much detailed policy knowledge etc for using in rebuttals of other political arguments. Reading political blogs is what radicalised me politically, made me seek more knowledge about political maneuvrings, and has made me actively seek to shape political discourse as much as I can.

I’m very much an independent voter (can’t really call myself a swinging voter if I’d never vote Lib/Nat) who’s unlikely to join any party as they currently stand. That doesn’t mean that I would never volunteer to leaflet or man a polling booth for a particular party at a particular election. Just persuade me (and others like me) that it should be your party, partisans!

I’d posit that the latter, done moderately (moderate moderation?), isn’t such a bad thing. It’s what the newspapers do at the moment, for example, with their online columns. Most comments on Big Media blogs are moderated, edited for possible slander/libel and so on (anything that the paper might be sued over facilitating) and then passed through. Sometimes with letters-from-the-Somme style holes cut in them

For me, though, this isn’t a kiss of death on Truth, Justice and the Idealist Way. I’m with Habermas in that I think for dialogue to happen, dialogic boundaries need to be in place. And I think the internet is a vastly more Darwinist ecosystem than any big brother/invasion etc commentator would have it. If someone is moderating a blog too heavily, you can bet you’ll read about that on another blog somewhere (as whoever looks after Rudd’s myspace page found out). Nothing exists in a vacuum on teh web. The web itself IS dialogic, even if its various component lexia aren’t. Unidirectional messages tend to eat themselves online as they just generate eyerolling rather than persuasion. The nature of rhetoric is massively in flux (and it occurs to me that there’s probably a nice paper or series thereof about online rhetorical philosophy versus traditional rhetorics - “Socrates in Cyberspace”).

So, were pollies to blog more actively (and some are doing that now) I don’t think that dissenting voices would be culled from the comments or that it would be some kind of assault on the web. Jockey though they might, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and so on haven’t been able to own the web yet and aren’t likely to. Howard, bless his little cotton eyebrows, isn’t likely to do much better.

In the end, over zealous policing of comments on political blogs backfires bigtime. Too many we users are far too savvy for that to fly. Rather, I would expect that these spaces, should they arise in any truly pervasive sense, would allow for an (albeit potentially lopsided) dialogue - if only between commentators rather than the bloggers themselves - and I’d peg even that as being a seismic shift from how things are currently done.

Daniel, the dangers of Orwellian homogeneity of message are principally present in Big Media active dissemination / passive consumption systems. They’re also principally present in scary bedtime stories told to 1950’s Idaho schoolchildren or the kinds of science fiction novels whose covers feature women in loincloths. That kind of unidirectional flow of information content is done and dusted. That’s why Packer the little is busy buying casinos and shedding media outlets, and it’s why I’m not likely to buy shares in any media conglomerate (or film, or music for that matter) any time soon. I think your take on the powers of government are a little simplistic. They could order that “everyone who blogs be registered using the claim that blogs offer a potential threat to national security”. I suppose they could also order that we all dance naked by the light of the harvest moon, but I’m not sure anyone would pay much attention, or that any government who didn’t want a major constitutional or civic crisis on their hands would even think in that direction.

Tigtog, as always, you’re a delight to read.

I reported it as spam, but politicians are exempt from that legislation.

The more discussions there are going on about politics, the more likely it is that a reader/participant will become emotionally engaged with a particular political argument. Continued engagement with political discussions makes people more passionate about politics, and thus more likely to talk to others about it as well, and thus it goes on.

Our big parties have a lock on the corporate media, so I don’t expect them to fully utilise the strategic aspects of online communication in an innovative way: they don’t perceive that they might need to, and they probably don’t as yet. But generating buzz online could make a big difference for the smaller parties, which we need for checks and balances in our government system, so I want those smaller parties to innovate and do it effectively.

But look at the huge popularity of privately sponsored partisan websites in the States. The Dems and Repubs, both the party machine and the individual candidates, ensure that there’s talking points memos galore on their official sites for the unofficial partisan websites to riff off. The US Libertarian party does the same, so do various lobbying coalitions. That’s what the parties in Australia are mostly failing to do.

The danger is that you might end up with a lot of NSFW content - just like the link above. It would be a “courageous” (in the Sir Humphrey Appleby sense) move to organise one’s party site in the matter above.

Your comments about America are ill-informed. Many in the States are scared of their Government, of its extreme right wing agenda. I communicate with them all the time so I’m in a position to know.

I would urge everyone to get involved with websites outside of Australia so that some kind of balance is achieved. The local scene tends to be somewhat parochial!

Exactly, steve, and I’m responding to the suggestion by Daniel that pointing this out and suggesting this needs to improve is somehow facilitating their ‘invasion’ of intertubes.

So, this thread’s topic is discussing how internet strategies can be more effectively used by political advocates in the upcoming election. Your broader conspiracy theories are off-topic and are derailing the thread. Please desist now.

Some in America argue it is happening there already!

Some on this thread (like me) argue that the passive voice allows unsustainable statements to pass without question. In the US as in Australia, political blogging thrives freely. Ingsoc remains as yet unimplemented.

what is happening currently appears innocuous enough, the government discovering the internet. But then things are not always as they first appear, are they?

No, it’s pretty much as it appears. Politicians have websites and some even blog. It’s not going to turn into the Reichstag fire if you look away for ten seconds, Chicken Little.

Tigtog, what is happening currently appears innocuous enough, the government discovering the internet. But then things are not always as they first appear, are they?

Steve, rapid change is happening already. Look at the new laws which more and more cut across our freedoms and rights. Look at Hicks, Haneef, etc.

I don’t really see how making their own material more easily accessible to bloggers and the net-savvy constitutes an invasion on the part of ‘politicians’.

Adam, surely the post is mainly about how they are not making their material or themselves more easily accessible. I don’t really expect this to change much in my lifetime either. Dysfunction actually thrives on secrecy.