In the course of my research, I’ve been reading lots of net history. There are exceptions to the rule, but the same dichotomised themes tend to recur again and again without resolution, and as a number of authors, including the excellent Fred Turner, point out – too many concepts have been taken over from 90s style cyber-utopians and Californian boosters without much reflection on their adequacy. One of those is Howard Rheingold‘s “virtual community” (and to be fair to Rheingold, he’s much more nuanced than some of his academic epigones!)… We seem to be stuck in a hermeneutic circle – of the bad kind – suspended between online writing as media substitute and online communication as pure public sphere. If what occurs online falls short of either (heavily) ideal(ised) type, then it appears to fall into the worthless category by default.

Let’s have a look at some antidotes.

First a quote from communications scholar David D. Perlmutter:

…for most of the history of our species, we were creatures of small groups and personal ties: Bigness, as in cities, crowds, or news networks, has not changed our affinity for one-on-one love, friendship, and affinity.

There is, of course, much sociological scholarship bemoaning (or celebrating) “weak ties”, “the fall of the public man [sic]“, an “individualised society” and so on. Sometimes I think this is a matter of taste – a fair bit of social theory that floats free from empirical research can be very affect laden – not always a bad thing, but it needs to be a subject for authorial reflection. Call me a Weberian if you like! Nevertheless, it is fair to say that modernity brings about at least a sense of isolation for many.

A lot of the critique of things like blogs, social network sites, and the practices associated with them, goes to the alleged illusory quality of online interaction. “Facebook friends aren’t real friends and Facebook will destroy friendship!”… There’s also a privileging of presence over a putative absence because embodied communication is mediated rather than direct or face to face (a false dichotomy which ignores the mediation of all communication) which slips very easily into a claim that communicating online is selfish or solipsistic. “Folks just write about their cats”, “Blogging is just attention seeking!”…

These critiques seem to me to be based on completely flawed premises, and they’re reinscribed from all sorts of angles. It might be a conservative bemoaning “bowling alone” or a post-structuralist talking about online communication as a “technology of the self” (without really getting what Foucault was getting at, I hasten to add).

Aside from the presence/absence thing, I could also mention the fact that “strong ties” and “weak ties” is an inadequate taxonomy. Friendships, relationships, family ties, work relationships, relationships with pets, feelings about non-human objects or places – all are dynamic and variable rather than static and invariant – because they’re precisely constituted through relationship – even when the other is (apparently) absent. It just isn’t the case that there are two opposed poles of “real” and “virtual” friendships, never the twain to meet.

So how to think about online interaction? A bit of preliminary speculation…

I was also struck by Geert Lovink‘s observation in Zero Comments that the scholarship of blogging hasn’t been taken up by literary scholars expert in the arts of writing the self – keeping a diary or a log, that is to say. Whether or not he’s fairly characterising the absence of such comparisons or analyses, I’m not qualified to say. But it does seem intuitively right that blogging, twittering, status updating and all the other panoply of online writing techniques have something in common with diarising – even to the point that there’s a compulsion to do so, as Lovink suggests.

It also seems to me that there’s an extensability of trust involved in sharing a diary with others, which is analogous to the sort of dynamic privacy involved in writing the online self – it’s variegated according to who can and will read it, and it’s also much more other-oriented.

If it is true that modernity erodes connections, then perhaps postmodernity seeks to recreate that feeling of connectedness virtually?

I think trust, and the ability to put oneself out there, which is actually an act of trust, is possibly the key. I’m not saying, mind, that all such interactions will be characterised by trust, and as we’ve seen in spades over the last few days, some are otherwise motivated, to put it charitably. And I don’t want to go all cyber-utopian on you either…

But I do think when we’re taking the good with the bad, we should see trust as a sort of aspirational or motivational tendency – a horizon of the practice of online communication, if you like. I think it’s much neater and possibly more analytically useful to understand online behaviours and practices in these terms rather than through reductive comparisons to other sorts of practices, or testing them against impossible and never realised ideals.

For the record, there’s a basic difference between my approach to punditry and that of the press wizards at the Oz. They wrote stories almost daily for months claiming the election could be called the next day, or the next week, or was “imminent” or whatever. I waited until I actually had firm information – from Labor sources. Not reading the tea leaves or joining the dots with the latest news story and claiming there was now a “trigger” or the government was “under pressure” (from whom, I wondered?)… I’ll stand by the claim that the final decision to go ahead with an early election hadn’t been made until late last week. Any enterprising journos who doubt that might like to, well, investigate – perhaps by contacting people involved in that decision rather than speculating in retrospect. If there were indeed cunning plans afoot which journos can now reveal, whatever stopped them writing about the said cunning plans when they were actually being made and implemented?

To adopt a phrase that’s been around the traps lately with regard to the distinction between bloggers and journos, I picked up the phone. I’m not so sure the pundits did. End of story. Let’s get on with talking about the campaign!

I’d also point out that the method of selective quotation does produce a real (and intended) distortion in the story about what was being said here. That’s no great surprise, but anyone interested in boring old fashioned stuff like the truth can make their own minds up by reading the posts in question in their entirety. They can be accessed via this tag.

When have news journos derived their copy off bloggers?

Some people think that the answer is… quite often. I’m with them. Consider this passage here at LP – posted by Mark on Saturday, about the negotiating stances of the government and The Greens and Steve Fielding on the stimulus package’s Senate passage:

I suspect that this manoeuvring might factor more into what comes out of the Budget sausage machine. The government has clearly been shifting its rhetoric on the unemployed, and I would expect the minors to be told that people on benefits will benefit as a result of the Henry Review. So it may be that some commitments might be made for future measures in exchange for current support. That would still, however, give the minor party Senators a real chance to shape the response to the economic downturn.

Then consider this from Michelle Grattan on the same topic, posted on the SMH website last night:

It is also clear the Government will have to review the level of the dole when it looks at pensions in the budget. It is inconceivable it could give pensioners a hefty increase but do nothing for the jobless.

The Government has locked itself into action on pensions so it might as well do the same on the dole.

Coincidence? Great minds? Picking up the phone? Some other explanation? You be the judge…

We’re very excited to have these fine folks on board, and hope everyone will welcome them heartily to LP!

It’s a timely book on the importance and necessity of blogging and the open web given recent un-informed opinions by writers like Christian Kerr.

The book is also important in that it more thoroughly expands on ideas expressed in David Burchell’s clumsy opinion piece in the Australian in July of this year where he attempted to contrast the “pseudo-expertise and vituperation” of Western bloggers with their counterparts in the less democratic corners of the world; using Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez as an example.

The most impressive thing about Sanchez is her complete disregard for the bad habits of Western bloggers. She refuses to engage in histrionics, vainglory, pseudo-knowledge or personal posturing. Instead she trades in the gentler arts of allegory and satire.

Sanchez is also mentioned in The Blogging Revolution and Burchell is right. She does not engage in the histrionics of so many Western bloggers (mea culpa) but then again our personal circumstances are different to those that live in repressive states.

Are critics like Burchell and Kerr right? Are non-Western bloggers really better than their western counterparts? Are they less vituperative and undergraduate in their opinion? Does living in an information poor society mean that their views can be nothing more than that of a pseudo-expert? What do non-Western bloggers sound like? The Blogging Revolution gives us a peek behind the government filters.

Throughout the book Loewenstein introduces us to writers like Caesar, an Iraqi blogger he met in Damascus.

Reading his story, we find that Caesar’s father was an officer in Saddam’s army who fought the Americans in the 1991 Gulf War, but as Caesar states, “my father wasn’t fighting for Saddam, he was fighting for his country” – that kind of distinction comes up repeatedly in different contexts throughout the book.

We also hear that Caesar was a bought man when it came to supporting the American invasion and had even worked for them as a translator for a time before fearing for his life as a collaborator. This soon saw him and his family leave for the relatively safer confines of Syria.

From Caesars and many Iraqi’s perspective, who wouldn’t want to see Saddam overthrown? All media was under state control there was no real ability to openly express your frustrations and views on your society or even to write about that girl you liked.

Similar to many Western bloggers, Caesar writes about issues of both a personal and political nature, his blog covers sexual politics as much as political events, in fact his blog is titled “In Iraq, sex is like snow”.

Is this vituperation and an undergraduate tone, Iraqi style?

As a result Caesar has an online reputation as some kind of “sex maniac”, an odd description given that he is a self described virgin. Then again context is everything and in his world he just may be someones sex maniac.

Caesar also uses his writing to describe what his country looks like, or should look like. In his case it shows what a liberal Iraqi looks like and if blogging is anything at all it’s liberal; in the freewheeling unmediated sense of the word. And while he may be far less freewheeling than many of his Western blogging counterparts his writing is probably no less confronting to the Burchell’s and Kerr’s of his world.

As Loewenstein states:

Blogging was almost invented for people like Caesar. It is unpretentious, revealing and transparent about daily life – and thankfully doesn’t require a tentative editor to censor the explicitness or rawness of the material. Hearing about his displacement in Syria and longing for his homeland made me feel ashamed of our culpability in the Iraq disaster. Those in power in the West have taken no responsibility for the effects of their actions, as if the tragedy was a natural disaster over which they had no control. Without his blog Caesar’s eloquence in the face of such horrors would never have been seen or heard.

Not being seen nor heard is another one of the recurring themes in The Blogging Revolution, outside of a few star non-western bloggers adopted by the mainstream media we have not heard from many others in the growing mass of bloggers in places like Syria and Iran, why? Is it because these voices don’t subscribe entirely to our mainstream media’s political view of the way the world ought to work?

I’m not alone in thinking our mainstream media would better serve us by airing the views of an Iranian female writer who identified as a Muslim secular atheist than that of Lindsay Lohan, but then again why not cut out the increasingly untrustworthy middleman and head right to the source, it is a media revolution after all.

Make no mistake, many of the non-Western bloggers and writers portrayed in the book want much of what we have but on their terms. A thought repeatedly expressed in the book is that they want these things at a different pace, one determined by them, not one forced on them from the outside without their overwhelming approval and they want these things to fit naturally into their specific cultural and political contexts.

At the moment we have the luxury of not having to negotiate our writing through levels of cultural and/or state based censorship, though we do have to deal with attempts at muting our voices through all too regular opinion pieces like Burchell’s and Kerr’s – opinions that seek to denigrate and deny us a growing legitimacy that they would like to preserve for themselves.

There was a quote early in the book which came from a prominent Iranian Shia cleric who recognised the power of the open web and blogging by saying, ‘blogging due to it’s very nature, has the capacity to nurture the spirit of vulgarity….[and is] a destructive plague’.

In this at least, Western mainstream media blog critics like Burchell and Kerr are not too dissimilar to an Iranian cleric or Cuban despot in recognising the inherent power of blogging and the voices it contains. Their motives? To maintain an economic market share not a religious or political one, though sometimes political motives are not to be discounted.

The Blogging Revolution is about introducing us to a different and difficult blogging world but Antony Loewenstein has also succeeding in produced a highly readable addition in the ongoing blogging and open media wars.

How will she fare in the TV debates against the veteran politicker Biden? Will Palin’s history of running for Miss Alaska back when Obama was applying to Harvard Law School help balance the whole “celebrity” schtick? We’ll have to wait and see over the next two months (which could be a very long two months of infuriating sexism levelled against a different female candidate this time (the concept of vpilf.com is especially obstreperating)). But if the McCain campaign has chosen a woman at least partly to appeal to Hillary supporters, well: anti-abortion advocate Palin is not the woman those disaffected Dems are looking for, that’s for sure. How insulting to left-leaning women generally for the GOP to think that she could be: as if all that matters to Hillary supporters is that Hillary was a woman, so Palin is interchangeable just because she’s a woman too.

What I do find interesting though is that in McCain choosing a woman as VP who’s more socially conservative than he is, he is playing to the potentially disaffected Republican base, those people who won’t vote Obama in a million years but who might very well choose to stay home rather than vote McCain – Palin might just tip enough of them into turning up at the polls. Obama’s choice of Biden, oddly, appears to be also playing particularly to the potentially disaffected Republican base (who, remember, mostly wouldn’t vote Obama in a million years). This is not to say that Biden doesn’t have any strong points on the left side of the balance, but his particular strength for the combined ticket is as a centrist with some hawkish credentials. Why aim to appeal to the right more than to the base of Democrats feeling alienated, Dems who were willing to vote for him earlier this year if he ended up the nominee but who now have doubts because he’s been equivocating on their core issues as part of running after swinging Republicans (a pattern repeated by the last few Dem presidential campaigns – why do they keep running after the right instead of shoring up the left? how many Congress majorities do they have to lose to get the message?).

Of course McCain chose a Veep to appeal to his base on the Right rather than any possible swing from the Left. Most of those people who read carefully are well aware that the PUMA phenomenon is over-hyped, a media narrative picked up and blown out of all proportion. The resentment is there in bucketsful, sure (including a couple of bloggers who’ve been on my feed reader for ages and who regularly rant in fine PUMA style). There’s especially heaps of resentment that traditional pro-forma procedures acknowledging close contenders were banned from happening by the DNC just for this convention: nevertheless that doesn’t mean that a majority of Hillary supporters are going to vote for McCain out of spite (a term with interesting connotations), especially in a swing state – they can count the numbers on the Supreme Court as well as anybody.

But what about the disaffected Dems living in states that are solidly red or blue in presidential elections? Where a small proportion of those not toeing either party line cannot influence the electoral college result, but whose vote can strategically influence other results? Those who perhaps initially supported Edwards as a check against corporatism, then who may have voted for Hillary in the primaries because of her determination regarding healthcare, and who’ve never particularly been convinced that Obama is strong in the areas that matter most to them? The Greens for one are going to pick up plenty of votes, enough to allow them to develop their party funding base and become a more influential party in the next election and the election after that. The perception that the Dem National Committee has simply ignored their concerns could also hurt a lot of Dems running for Congress/Senate at the State and local levels – the Dems could conceivably win a Presidency that has to cope with a hostile Congress and more Republican/Independent Governors than ever before.

At the beginning of this year, there were plenty of Dem voters looking at the candidacies of Edwards, Clinton and Obama and thinking “wow, this is great, I could happily vote for any of them, we’re not only going to sweep the Presidency we’ll sweep both Houses as well”. That general cross-candidate goodwill has largely evaporated amongst many Dems who first supported other contenders because they feel that their vote is being demanded as an entitlement rather than having their issues considered in the way that the issues of disaffected Republicans are being considered.

Even worse, people who are not fully on board with Obama, even those who are just saying “I’ll vote for him, but I’m not that happy about it” are reporting that others both online and in their social/family circles are bullying them for not being evangelically pro-Obama. That sort of bullying is not going to convince hold-their-nose Obama voters to become fervid supporters and evangelists for Obama-Biden, but it may well push them into not voting for other Dems on the ticket for all those other elections in November.

There comes a point when people should just be satisfied (though not complacent) that the numbers are falling their way with the potential to get even better. No need to get true-believer on people’s arses as well.

My concern is not what you argue but how you go about it.

My mind is open on pretty much every issue. It’s what journalists do for a living: keep their minds open in the hope that they catch the next new idea out there.

Sadly, what a significant minority of my bloggers do is begin their posts with an assumption that everyone who disagrees with them is a “moron”.

Here’s why those posts grate: My job as a journalist is to assume that the person who disagrees with me doesn’t know what I know. To increase the sum of their knowledge, I can only tell them what I know on their terms, in their language. Which must begin with an assumption that I am not better than my reader.

Anyone who remembers the “civility wars” from a few years back in the Ozblogosphere would also recall the lesson that the worst possible way of getting a more civil commenting community is to call for one! The dreaded meta-post would open old wounds, and bring out the worst in people. The facilitation of community on blogs requires a sense of humour, a democratising of the conversation, and participants who are actually interested in doing practicing community in the first place. None of those things is particularly evident in the MSM “blog” threads for a whole range of reasons. But one of them is the distance between the journalist/columnist and the “readers”, even if they’re anachronistically dubbed “bloggers”.

Trevor Cook has also very astutely picked up on this – the well known phenomenon that the tone of an online space and the deportment of its facilitators will shape the character of the debate – by questioning whether News Limited’s online practice itself isn’t full of ad homs and a sneering and derogatory tone to those who dissent. See his post for more.

A lot of the expectations and framing of the work of the journalist is in terms of the “public sphere” – a presumed space where rational and civil debate takes place (Habermas has a lot to answer for). But as any Rawlsians out there will know, you bring your own status and commitments with when you try to inhabit a “neutral” and “rational” space. And a big part of that is the “professional” – the journalist – talking (even if they try to descend a few inches down the pedestal) from an authoritative speaking position – Megalogenis himself refers to his own professional status and its habits of thought. But we live in a world where arguments from authority are failing, and talk is being democratised (in a sense).

I’d like to counter that image with one I picked up in something I read recently – we should think in terms of a ludic and performative public sphere. We’re not doing world shattering things when we “natter on the net”, to quote Dale Spender. We’re not sorting out the destinies of the world. We are doing something meaningful, and if we approach it in a spirit of play, then you’ve actually got more genuine communication and debate occurring.

Just sayin…

Ian: I thought he did rather well.

Tony: Tie worked well as well, bowled, front foot.

Ian: Yeah, a few prickly questions.

Tony: Yeah, bloggers.

Interesting that the view here is of bloggers being prickly; meaning what? Asking the tough questions that the MSN (gallery) won’t? Are there any non MSM ‘real’ or independent bloggers at the PM’s doorstop pressers in Canberra around to be prickly?