Following up on Chris’ post on the expansion of the sphere, another metablogging entry. I was very pleased last week to be invited by the editors of a forthcoming book, The Uses of Blogs, to contribute a chapter on the political uses of blogs. Details of the project and contributors can be found by following the previous link.
Co-editor Jo Jacobs has posed some questions for me to think about in researching and framing the chapter. Input appreciated:
Specifically, we’d be interested in a chapter which looks at the use of blogs as a catalyst for political activism – not so much reporting of news items, but as a space where groups of similar minded people can get together and induce change (or at least attempt to induce it!). The sort of questions we’d be most interested to have you address are:
- What is the potential for blogs to affect politics and social policy development?
- What are some examples of blog activism, and how ‘successful’ have these been (in terms of attracting membership/increasing awareness, etc)?
- What is hacktivism and how valuable are blogs in promulgating the culture?
- How significant could hacktivism be in democratic participation with mass adoption of blogs?
- How might flash mobs or other blog-oriented groups be considered part of the hacktivist culture?
- How important are A-list, B-list and even “huddled-masses” bloggers in disseminating political messages?
- What is the importance of commentary systems in debating political issues in blogs?
Finally, we’d like to hear about how you see the future of political activism online through the medium of blogging.
Somewhere hanging around about nil, I’d say. Comment threads are great for wasting time and stoushing but debate? That’s stretching the thread, as it were.
To blog is fun and every now and then it’s educational. But it’s not journalism, it’s not intellectual work, except for a very few sites it’s not political activism, and it is most certainly not effective political debate.
If only for the reasons we’ve been discussing on Naomi’s thread on women and comments.
Stoushing is political debate.
I’d say that political debate on blogs and Internet forums is more significant than the staged “debates” in Parliament and the mainstream media. This is because participation is wide-open, and is not restricted to a selected few as in other fora. The community has a real voice on the Internet which it doesn’t have elsewhere.
As for the impact of blogs on politics in general, one has only to look at the 2004 elections in the US to see major effects that actually changed the outcome of some campaigns. And that’s just a foretaste of what is to come.
By contrast, hacktivism is a bit of a joke.
EP, you know as well as I that a voice is not the same as power. Ask yourself, if I think so many people agree with me, and you think so many people agree with you, that neither of us feel that we’re listened to?
To stoush politically is enjoyable. It might even be a more active form of citizenship than most people experience in their local communities. It doesn’t change the fact that Australia is home to a ruling class who hold and maintain power.
That Parliament’s most prominent blogger is a Democrat, though, I think shows up the real total lack of power in blogging.
Oh, and agreed, ‘hacktivism’ is a joke. Amen.
I see your problem. You assume that “Australia is home to a ruling class who hold and maintain power”, and that bloggers do not have access to that class.
This assumption is incorrect. Power ultimately comes from the consent of the governed (even in Soviet Russia, as we saw in 1989), and thus the opinions of all of us are significant.
Again, I point to the US elections of 2004, where blogs demonstrated real, election-winning political power.
Bollocks they did, EP. Don’t believe the hype!
On a smaller scale there was Scott Burgess at The Daily Ablution’s memorable take-down of Dilpazier ‘The Sassy Islamist’ Aslam at The Guardian, which surely said something about the power of political blogs. Scott’s publication of the fact that Aslam was a member of an extremist Islamic party forced The Guardian to fire him (Aslam, that is).
Don’t know why these links don’t work the first time when they look fine in Preview. Try here.
Oh alright then. http://dailyablution.blogs.com/the_daily_ablution/
Yes they did, Robert. I was watching as it happened.
You’re just in denial because our blogs won and your blogs lost.
Political uses of blogs
Mark Bahnisch is soliciting sagacity about the political uses of blogs for a piece he’s going to be doing for a forthcoming book. Have your say at this post at Larvatus Prodeo….
I largely agree with Naomi. It all depends on the direction in which blogs eventually head in the future. One thing our rubbishing of op/ed columnists in the major rags proves is that these columnists clearly are somewhat central to mainstream political debate, regardless of their actual relevance. If political blogs eventually converge towards a convesational op/ed form of journalism, and people start to cotton onto the fact that a lot of the ideas bubbling away from the MSM are quite often good ones, then there is no reason to think that they won’t become more influential in the broader media.
Ackerman, Devine, Adams, and the like aren’t just op/ed columnists. They are effectively print bloggers. Blogging just doesn’t suffer from the elongated discussion timeframes associated with op/ed columnist journalism (e.g. column published, letters to the editor appear in response, columnist responds if they could be bothered, etc.)
mark, i think you need to define what you mean by ‘politics’. You probably need to make the distinction between the politics of the everyday (or culture) and the politics of politics (pace Meaghan Morris). http://bad.eserver.org/issues/1995/22/editors.html
Your posts and others often pick up issues that belong to the politics of politics, while other blogs write about the everyday. ‘Politics’ as a separate realm is part of the ‘public’ sphere and is highly masculine. This is reflected in the ‘stoush’ style of commenting here on LP.
A second distinction would have to made between what is considered ‘political’. On one hand, ‘political’ refers to a particular *content* of discourse that may emerge in any milieu (eg you may have a political discussion with a taxi driver). On the other hand, there is the performative dimension of political speech acts (or ‘blog acts’). Here I am thinking of Judith Butler’s example in Gender Trouble. The equivalent acts here would be where the ‘dominant’ is forced to reconfigure itself in appreciation of the ‘blog act’. Example would be a recent article about academic blogs (blog off or something) and the guy who got the sack for blogging about working at google.
This performative political dimension of blogging can be diluted. I make some comments towards the end of my blogtalk paper about blogging as a ‘zero institution’ (from academic blogger Jodi Dean http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/ who gets it from Zizek). The way I understand this is that ‘blogging’ is a social mechanism that captures political disourse of the first kind to empty out the possibility of performative political acts of the second. The result is that ‘political blogging’, that is blogging that explicitly relates to the field of ‘politics’ and invites commentary from self-fashioned political pundits, becomes a specific form of popular culture. With the number of blogs it is a form of mass popular culture (insert reworked traditional mass-culture critique here). Everyone seems to have something to say. my paper: http://incsub.org/blogtalk/?page_id=52 (not really polished, but you should get some useful references).
Most work on this so far seems to have from a uber-nerd POV looking at the linking activity between so-called political blogs, where the definition of ‘political’ goes unreflectively unquestioned. Not sure what the utitlity of this is beyond making sweet looking power point presentations.
Glen, thanks for that. I agree that “the political” needs to be problematised. I have a work deadline to meet tonight so I’ll say something about it tomorrow.
I do tend to think that the uptake of this culture by such a wide array of people dilutes its capacity to become a mass movement for change.
On the contrary, it is precisely the uptake of blog culture by a wide array of people that enhances its ability to act as a mass movement for change.
It already is one in the US, and will increasingly become so as other countries catch up with its rate of uptake.
oh, EP! I agree! The mass uptake is exactly evidence of change from below… Naomi, I am confused by your comment!?!? first part I agree with, last sentence I am not following your logic?!!?
One of the fascinating things about Dean’s article is that even though the net may be an ‘apparatus of capture’ that provides ‘safe’ circuits of discussion, (from what I can remember!!) she doesn’t really allow for the fact it is also a massive database that can fuel the old-fashioned leisure activity of ‘consciousness raising’. It is all but a google search away. the real power here is not the production of political content, but access to political content. the other side of this is the revolution in infotainment distribution wrought by the internet.* Just imagine how informed people are going to have to force themselves to be just so they can wade through the many uninformed comments on blogs!! I am looking forward to reading what someone like Friedrich Kittler has to say about all this.
* the flipside to this, and what I am partially interested as a tangent to my dissertation, is how the cultural industries are responding. Lower movie ticket prices is just the tip of the iceberg i suggest. that have been so intent in exploiting every dimension of the cultural franchise event (movie, book, computer game, happy meal, etc) they forgot that this actually gives consumers much more power in selecting what dimension of the cultural franchise event they are going to consume. ah, yes… but this is a tangent.
Political Uses of Blogs
Link: Larvatus Prodeo ÔøΩ Political Uses of Blogs. Following up on ChrisÄô post on the expansion of the sphere, another metablogging entry. I was very pleased last week to be invited by the editors of a forthcoming book, The Uses of Blogs, to contribu…
I think at this stage, the political uses of blogs are more like antenna than mandibles.
Ants will swarm around something edible on the balcony floor and carry it off in handy little components, but they don’t actually make or force you to drop what they are lugging back for a nest pigout. However at least they’ll draw attention to what you overlooked or left open to go off.
Id just like to say a few things about a couple of the questions.
“What is the potential for blogs to affect politics and social policy development?”
“What are some examples of blog activism, and how ÄôsuccessfulÄô have these been (in terms of attracting membership/increasing awareness, etc)?”
Really, the only way blogs can, in any meaningful way, affect policy and the outcomes of elections are to act as rally points. One blog cannot do this, with the exception of Daily Kos (which you must mention) which is really a community of little blogs, spearheaded by Markos and a few others who post on the front page. The reason it cannot be done by one blog is that there is not enough of a community in one individual blog, even an A-lister, to get anything done or make enough noise.
There needs to be cross-blog chatter about an issue, the blogging community needs to function more as a collective and discuss major issues on as many blogs possible, come up with a middle ground, and see about making some noise and pushing an agenda. Daily Kos and groups of other blogs in America have achieved (very limited) sucess with this, but pretty much nothing has happened here in Ozblogistan – I can count the number of issues that have been major cross-blog deals on one hand, and none have got anywhere near the mainstream. This is because we are just working at our own little agendas, not trying to make any noise with collective voices.
Blogs have to become nexuses of discussion about various political issues and be able to rally people using their combined resources and voice to put out a message on an issue they want mainstream society to take notice of. If this is done, there is a chance at increasing overall public awareness, and even influencing public opinion in a small way. Once this has been done, the government might think about it.
The MSM is not a good place to do this. It undoubtably has a very, very large influence on public opinion and culture, but columnists are not really able to rally any action. Bolt and Adams may have legions of adoring readers who will start to think like them, but it will go no further other than to influence their votes. If you want to get something happening, you need an inclusive environment – a two way street – and blogging has that potential, but only on a small scale.
A really good example, IMO, is that of Zach Stark being sent to Love in Action. One guy he knew posted about it on his blog, then others noticed, wrote about it themselves, and so on. Eventually there was hundreds if not thousands carrying the story, including my own. There was media attention, albeit mostly from smaller outlets, and it spawned what is gearing up to be another debate in the religious right vs the forces of sanity battle. From the first week, a group called the Queer Action Coalition was formed. They organised protests outside the LIA compound and poked news outlets and provided comment. Zach is now out and has vowed not to be a poster boy, but the coalition that was started by his incarceration will continue as a wider force for political and social change on relevant issues, using its media attention and blog base to launch it and other groups into the mainstream discussion.
Blogs cant change the world or compete with the MSN, nor should they. But they can be a launching platform for other forms of activism that would not have begun otherwise.
Secondly:
“How important are… bloggers in disseminating political messages?”
I have always liked the idea of one of the major roles of the blogosphere being to act as a Fifth Estate. The media is supposed to not only report news, but to call politicians on their bullshit and get inside their heads to tell the public what is really going on. More often than acceptable, they fail to do this and instead fall into the same trap.
Blogs can then in turn keep the media bastards honest. Then it becomes a case of “who watches the watchers of the watchers?” Its simple, the blogosphere polices itself. Because columnists and reporters do not have a two way street except on the perpetual joke that is the letters page, the media is quite bad at policing itself, and Media Watch often does a bad job. Blogs do not have this problem, as they have comment threads for commenters to civily disagree, or go to their own blogs and post a rebuttle – something columnists almost never bother to do unless they are treading over old ground with personal or ideological grudges.
Its a complementary system where the media and blogosphere help each other in differnet ways.
“The media is supposed to not only report news, but to call politicians on their bullshit.”
Rilly? Where is that carved in stone? Aside from on the forehead of some of the more pompous pundits.
The media’s been utterly partisan, backed by political interests, right, left, centre and out there, right from the moment scurrilous handbills about the Pope, produced by that newfangled Gutenberg technology, got flung into the streets of London, Geneva and the rest of Mittle Europa.
I think itÄôs an interesting testimonial to the essential decency of western civilisation that the media’s not even more biased (in any direction) than it currently is.
Incidentally, according to that most establishment of organs, ‘The Readers Digest’, the ABC is the trusted news organisation in Australia.
Yes, Nabs, but that presumed that there would be more than just a monolithic right-wing media. Thus truth would emerge from partisan debate, as it were. So Nic has a point.
the ABC is the trusted news organisation in Australia.
Only because most people don’t actually use its news services.
Nabs, that was a statement of opinion by me as a journalist and a citizen, not a fact. Carve it on my forehead if you like.
“Carve it on my forehead if you like.”
OK. But you realise I’ll have to abbreviate it.
You could write really, really small…
“You could write really, really small…”
Didn’t think I had a choice anyway, Jimmy O.
“What is the importance of commentary systems in debating political issues in blogs?”
If this blog has done nothing else, it has opened my eyes to current thinking about Australian politics. It may only represent a small section of the community but this site has such diversity that it has really held my interest.
The opinions I have read have provided me with more information than I have ever got out of mainstream media. I am so new to the realm of politics (despite being born here – and being 25 years old) that I had to look up the idea of multiculturalism as a political idealogy/framework (I thought of it as a state of mind) because of a current thread at this site. Blogs are the most accessible forum for me to find out peoples’ opinions in an uncensored manner and to get myself educated on what may be behind the political decisions that I read about.
The ‘debate’ that goes on in blogs (including the conversational, and the more serious, even cut-throat arguments) provides an entertaining as well as enlightening place that I can take away others’ ideas and better formulate my own. I think that the medium itself selects for the kinds of people that I want to listen to, compared with say the opinion letters in a major newspaper.
Hope this helps!!
Blog Readers Up 45% in Q1
Buh-bye, New York Times. We won’t miss you.
EP, blogging will never, and should not, replace the MSM. Stop kidding yourself.
Perhaps not — but something will.
Because the MSM cannot continue in its present form. With the exception of radio, its audience has declined slowly but steadily. Soon the advertisers will go, too — and with them the money that keeps the newspapers and TV stations alive.
I see no likelihood that this process will be halted or reversed. Nor do I see anything wrong with that.
The oppressive, arrogant old media order is crumbling. Vive la revolution!
What Clare said.
It’s the political blogs with robust and plentiful comment boxes that are the most attractive, because there’s nothing more interesting (educational, even) than a stoush – no matter how unproductive the exchanges might be.
The MSM can never host a stoush.
EP is wrong again,as usual.
Blogs have limited impact on anything,just because EP works his keyboard to the bone he thinks that his opinions will change minds.
Blogs are to me better than TV or videos,but us nutters are always delusional.
I hate the dishonesty of bloggers like tim bliar who claim to be libertarians but censor others opinions.
Censorship is evil.
The foolish are always the last to learn …
Yes, EP, and you’re a really slow learner.
Fyodor 1, EP 0.
Like I said, you guys aren’t learning anything.
I’ve pointed out the statistics and the impact of blogs in real-world elections, and all you can do is make denials based on wishful thinking, without evidence.
No wonder the Left keeps getting blindsided by reality. Lefties purposely ignore things they don’t like, and then wonder what happened.
Where have you presented statistics on the impact of blogs on elections? Where is your evidence? Maybe we should get you a dunce’s cap.
I posted the statistics here, and referred to the impact of blogs on real-world elections here.
That dunce cap fits you nicely — it must be the pointy skull.
Ah, you’re going to bluster this one out as well. You’re not doing too well at the moment, are you, Tinkles?
The statistics were on blog use. Conclusion: lots of Americans use the Interweb. BFD.
The “impact of blogs on real-world elections” link referred to the biased and unreliable opinion of some blogging mediocrity.
Was this the evidence you were talking about, or do you want to sulk in the corner now?
You’re projecting, Fyodor. All the bluster is yours, in a futile attempt to bluff your way out of having been caught out on easily-verifiable claims.
The only “biased and unreliable blogging mediocrity” here is yourself. The impact of blogs on the US elections is well known to those who actually watched them, but for the benefit of the ignorant I will briefly mention some of the salient points.
Presidential election: The exposure of Kerry’s falsification of his war records by the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth was facilitated by blogs. While the mainstream media maintained a dedicated wall of silence for weeks, the blogs kept raising the issue until the MSM could no longer ignore it, since it was already in the public mind. This had a significant impact on Kerry’s chances.
Then there was Rathergate. A media report which was to form the basis of Democratic attacks on Bush for the month of August was exposed by blogs as being based on fraudulent documents. This shifted the public focus from the accusations against Bush to the lies of the media. It cost the Democratic Party a whole month of campaigning time and one of their major strategies.
Then there were the Senate elections. Blogs had a lesser effect here, but it is notable that the Democratic House majority leader, Tom Daschle, fell because several blogs made a point of reporting what he said in Washington to his constituents at home, bypassing the sycophantic local newspapers. That was another real-world scalp for blogs.
Now that I’ve explained in some detail the obvious things you’ve missed, Fyodor, you’ll pardon me if I no longer bother engaging with your mindless bluffing. There are some intelligent lefties on this blog, and I’d prefer to talk to them.
Oh, don’t go yet, EP, you were working yourself into a fine lather. Fact is, we don’t know what effect blogs had on voting intentions, and you’ve not shown any evidence supporting your case. Your wishful thinking and endless repetition are as unconvincing as always.
EP, all the examples you’ve mentioned also involved either competition amongs mainstream media sources, or serious amounts of money, not just blogs. The Swift Boat Veterans would have been ignored had they not had a lot of cash for TV and radio ads. Dan Rather’s competitors at the other networks loved every minute of his decline and fall.
Blogs might have had some effect getting out the vote, especially on US colleges. I doubt they convinced many poor people without computers to do the same. In Australia under compulsory voting you can scratch that effect totally.
I think you and I both know the pretty minimal potential for blogs to convince anybody to change their vote.
…
Am I one of your intelligent lefties, am I, am I?
EP neglects to mention that the blogs he credits Daschle’s defeat to were secretly run by the campaign of Daschle’s opponent.
As if the person running the blogs makes any difference to the argument. They were blogs. They defeated Daschle. End of story.
Liam, you’re squirming to avoid the obvious conclusion. Regardless of what excuses you may bring up, blogs were central to the exposure of Rather’s fakery in the first place, and to keeping the story alive in the second. As for SBVT, they only had enough money to run a few ads in one state — until the blogs picked up the story and the donations began flowing in. In both cases, blogs were central to making two major blows against a candidate in a narrowly contested election.
As we know that both Internet use and blog readership are growing at very fast rates — see my statistics above — it is only reasonable to conclude that blogs, which are already influential, will become more so.
Wishful thinking, EP. I’m not saying blogs are unimportant, but you’re attribution of influence is entirely subjective. Daschle wasn’t defeated by blogs – he had a tough fight against Thune from the beginning. It’s impossible to state, as you do, that blogs were decisive one way or the other. The SBVT was well-funded from the start, and Dan Rather’s fuckup would have been news in any medium. The fact that partisan blogs made great play of it doesn’t indicate that it wouldn’t have hit the MSM anyway, as it did.
It’s all subjective attribution, and your stats don’t tell us anything new.
EP, the result of the last Presidential election in the US was directly caused by more people voting Republican than voting Democrat. What caused those people to vote the ways they did, or what caused them, in the voluntary voting system, to vote at all, is a matter for conjecture. Everybody now, after me:
Correlation does not demonstrate cause!
By that argument, Liam, it is impossible to say whether or not anything at all had an influence on the election.
So you’ve been forced to retreat to complete theoretical nihilism in order to avoid the obvious conclusion.
EP, I tried to rethink the relation between blogging, the US 2004 election and media coverage of the election to circumscribe overly-simplistic accounts of the relationship between blogging and the outcome of the election in my blogtalk paper. I basically argued that imagining a direct link between blogging and the outcome of the US pres 2004 election is nonsense.
There is little or no way to prove that blogs impacted on the election directly in any conclusive or measurable way. However, it is possible to argue that blogs did affect the ‘media event’ of the election, ala swift boat story. big difference. It does not mean that blogs replace old media at all, it means that blogs continue to be annoying little growth of the side of old media. Much research has been done trying to figure out the relationship between media coverage of the event and the event itself – surprise, surprise, none of it is conclusive.
What is interesting is your conflation of the ‘media event’ with the ‘historical event’ (using Dayan and Katz’s terms). If such a conflation is valid, then neo-con ownership and neo-liberal alignment of Fox would be a much more determining factor in the election than any swift boat silly buggers by bloggers.
What Glen said. EP, the fact that your pet theory got shot down does not void other explanations or theories. Ever heard of an exit poll?
No, this, EP, is what we like to call logical argument. You can keep your ‘obvious conclusion’, I’ll keep my standards of evidence.
It’s not hard to demonstrate, as you’ve done, that the US election last year caused a massive amount of blogging on the election. Proving that blogging influenced the election is much more difficult. (Of course I imagine it helps in the argument that blogs won it for the Republicans if you yourself maintain a right-wing blog).
I imagine those readers who know more about logic in the work of Karl Popper might care to enlighten us?
Of course, Popper would say that EP’s thesis is unfalsifiable, hence useless as an explanator.
Damn you, Liam, you party-popper.
You’ve beaten me to the punch more than once, Fedya. Fair’s fair.
Fair enough, Liaminal. I think you’re an intelligent Lefty, even if EP won’t say so.
Hey, believe what you want to believe. In good conscience, I’ve given you valid information. I can’t force you to make a serious analysis that might upset some of your dearly-held beliefs.
It’s no skin off my nose if the Left’s inability to perceive what is actually happening prevents it acting effectively.
In fact, I rather like it that way, especially on election nights — when the people who use faulty information and wishful thinking to predict the wrong outcome get blindsided yet again.
That’s exactly why you’re wrong, EP: it’s not about belief. Do you get it yet, slow learner?
EP, if we act so ineffectively, how is it that we’ve come to cause all of the problems you see in the world?
It’s all part of the historical dialectic, Liam.
The traditionalism of the last century was successfully critiqued, rendered obsolete, and transformed by what has become leftism today.
Now history has moved on, and it is the leftism itself that is in turn being critiqued, rendered obsolete and transformed by newer ideas.
Your movement occupies an analogous position to that of the conservatives of the 1950s at the beginning of the 1960s.
That’s an odd way of looking at the dialectic. Political cycles are a phenomenon of their own, not inherently dialectical. Considering the Right is currently politically ascendant in Australia and across the globe, I think you might also be looking at it the wrong way.
I’d be interested to hear what the new, transforming ideas behind your anti-leftism are. Most of the ideas behind the agendas of conservative and neo-conservative governments go way back to the nineteenth century: national sovereignty, ‘freedom’ of employment contract, free trade under the rule of law, maintenance of social order against disruptive minorities, and so on.
Once a Marxist, always a Marxist, eh Commiecat?
[sings]