It was interesting to watch, just now on ABC News 24, the press conference which followed the PM’s education policy announcements. I was somewhat heartened to see that all the questions focused on education policy, rather than on the usual “narrative” stuff. It was something of a rejoinder to Annabel Crabb’s claim that it was unduly difficult for journos to brief themselves sufficiently on policy, something I thought was far fetched, given that any intelligent listener who’s been following public debate can usually think up some salient lines of questioning (if they’re not too busy tweeting and texting).

Earlier, in the campaign, a post by GrogsGamut on the performance of the media stimulated an interchange between journos and bloggers on Twitter, something Mark wrote about here, and which journo James Massola reflected on in a piece published on Saturday.

There was less interchange on Twitter on Saturday, after a number of very forceful critiques were published in the blogosphere and alternative media of the appalling “body language”/Latham press conference in Brisbane (see Pavlov’s Cat’s guest post here, which entirely occluded any discussion of important announcements on seniors’ income support.

Some journos reacted defensively, but silence was largely the result.

I wonder, though, if the critique refracted by Twitter had some influence on the press pack improving its game today, and according to Bernard Keane, yesterday.

Update: Margaret Simons on the media’s coverage of policy.

The widespread practice of simply ignoring women in male-dominated discussions does not make the fact that we make up 51% of voters go away.

Indeed. Women are nigh on invisible, or at least very radically under-represented in most public discussions of electoral politics. But, as Pavlov’s Cat points out, we constitute more than a majority of the electorate… and that’s reflected in the composition of samples taken for polls. So as Possum reveals (with one of his spiffy graphs), the Coalition trails much further behind where they were at the last election with women voters than with male:

The Coalition is pulling a fairly stable average of 37-39 among male voters, which isn’t crash hot, but it’s not exactly terrible either. The thing about election campaigns is that it’s pretty easy to win or lose a few points with any demographic, so if the Coalition went into the next campaign only 3 or 4 points down among males, it’s a doable proposition for them.

With the female vote however, they’re pulling an average 34-37, which is a staggering 7 to 10 point decline on their result from the last election. Turning around a gap that large simply isn’t a doable proposition over the short time frame of an election campaign. For the Coalition to not go backwards at the next election (let alone win), they have to substantially improve their female voter base before the next election campaign starts, simply to give them some realistic base to launch a final assault on Labor from during the campaign itself.

[By the way, Possum also reveals with customary wonkiness and style, that the puzzle of why the PM is popular - so unintelligible to the press gallery and the Libs - might be explained by the fact that the PM is liked. Circular, I know, but there you have it...]

So, why, exactly, are the Libs so on the nose with women voters? Speculate away…

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.

After all the brouhaha about the Katherine Wilson/Keith Windschuttle hoax dies down, I suspect the most lasting insight to be derived from all the kerfuffle is that Wilson’s target had already disappeared into a long twilight of irrelevance. For mine, John Quiggin’s point about the saga is among the most telling – Windschuttle’s own credibility on the issue which has been central to the recent stages of his career – Indigenous history – lies in tatters because of his own inability to substantiate the claims he made many years ago now with further research. The biggest hoax, Quiggin argues, is Windschuttle’s own contribution to “the history wars”.

After a number of folks actually had a look at what’s published on Quadrant’s website these days, it’s painfully obvious that there’s very little credibility there to be undermined. Egregious grammatical errors, bizarre rants with scant evidence of an elementary ability to construct a coherent argument, to be sure.

So the other motto we might draw from the hoax affair is that it’s drawn attention to the absence of both standards and relevance in most of what Quadrant has to offer. Now that the mag, and its writers, no longer have their great patron John Howard sitting in Kirribilli, the phrase “paper tiger” comes to mind. Certainly that appears to be evident from this truly bizarre piece just posted on the magazine’s website by Michael Connor, referencing a comment made here at LP by Pavlov’s Cat – “the Left totalitarianism”, “the Left establishment”, “Hatred blows in from the Left”… etc. Perhaps Connor was rankled by his writing being described as “half crazed”. But what can all this hyperbole and nonsense mean, and does anyone bar Connor and his ilk really care? I think he and the rest of Windy’s wingnut stable’s response to the hoax contains an element of schadenfreude. They’ve been rescued – I strongly suspect temporarily – from their own feelings of relevance deprivation. It might have been better, I think, if the windmills had been allowed to fall over of their own accord, without the need for any tilting at them.

Update: Margaret Simons wraps up the reaction to the hoax at Crikey, and Graham Young provides a publisher’s perspective at On Line Opinion.

Pavlov’s Cat also has some interesting reflections on being a sociable blogger, and how addictive it can be. It’s well worth remembering that there is stuff to do other than correct people who are wrong on the internets. At a time when so many blogs are making the switch to the Crikey platform, and others are considering such a move (and that comments thread is worth a read), I think it’s important both to celebrate the independent blogosphere (not that I’m knocking the Crikey folks – quite the contrary) and blogging as an amateur practice in the best sense of the word – do it as long it’s fun and rewarding, and you’re writing about what you’re passionate about, not as a chore or because you think you’re on a mission to change the world. Remember that next time some concern troll or trollblogger denounces the whole show as falling short of the high standards the MSM sets for “balance and fact” or loudly condemns you for not blogging about this or that. The public sphere isn’t all uber serious rational deliberation (is it ever?) but a space for expression and enjoyment, or it should be.

Speaking of blogging, Rx advised in comments that Tim Dunlop’s commenting crew from the now sadly erstwhile Blogocracy have set themselves up in their own digs. That’s an interesting development, and it also goes to show one other important thing about the blogosphere – it’s the community that matters.

Elsewhere: Boynton.

Update: Lyn Calcutt at Public Opinion on the redistribution going on around the blogosphere.