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December 31, 2008
Graham Young at Ambit Gambit has a post on blogging. He considers the argument that this kind of blogging in Australia has arisen in reaction to the flaws in a safety-first journalism:
So, a consequence of lack of experience, lack of understanding, lack of resources, lack of tools, lack of proper training and lack of aptitude may well be that journalists end up practising "safety first". Or it may just be that journalism is a social activity and we tend to herd in social activities, which looks like "safety first".
I concur with his account of the flaws of journalism in the mainstream media----it is a more sophisticated account than the one I mentioned here.
Young then adds that if practising "safety first" journalism in the mainstream media was so, then we would expect to see scuds of bloggers who disagree with each other. However, his observation is that this is not the case, as what tends to happen is that bloggers herd together in mutually reinforcing circles:
There may be more points of view than are represented in the MSM, so there is less uniformity and more niches, but as there are more bloggers than journalists I doubt whether this represents a real increase in the risk profile. In which case, perhaps the urge to blog is driven not so much by the tendency of journalists towards "safety first", but because journalists are by and large socially homogenous and don't reaffirm the views of most bloggers, who in reaction create their own social networks.
I concur with this observation about Australian political bloggers. It's a better and more accurate account of what is happening than that of David Burchill in The Australian mid 2008.
If you recall, Burchill's column dismissed bloggers as the political dark side of the web:
The chief purpose of the political blog isn't the production of argument, but rather the staging of ceremonies of degradation and purification. The blogger's goal is to solidify a tribe of acolytes around them, and to ritually degrade those who are seen as renegades from the cause...This vast outpouring of pseudo-expertise and vituperation serves mainly as a testament to Western societies' tendency for producing self-important, opinionated folks far in excess of our capacity to employ them...In this the blogosphere resembles the so-called literary low-life of the decades before the French Revolution. In those days resentful and under-employed scribblers amused themselves by illegally publishing salacious rumours about Marie Antoinette or the clergy, the better to strip away the sacred veil of monarchical rule. Except that, in those days, publishing even salacious rumours required a certain sort of bravery.
Young's account shows up Burchill's account for what it is: as a conservative polemic against left wing bloggers.
The missing categories here are power, public sphere, deliberative democracy, debate, critical reasoning and user generated content. These categories, especially the latter, take us away from the narrow frame of the citizen journalism literature which tends to reduce blogging to journalism. Instead of looking back we can look forward to what blogging opens up for us in the context of the decline of the business model of the press and the crisis in journalism.
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Political blogging necessarily emerges from local social and political contexts, so Burchell's suggestion that everyone should emulate a Cuban blogger is a bit silly.
Rosen's argument, that it comes about because of problems with the media, has more to do with Rosen's own context as a proponent of citizen journalism I think.
"The missing categories here are power, public sphere, deliberative democracy, debate, critical reasoning and user generated content." Apart from user generated content, I'd argue that these are less useful categories for thinking about political blogging. Except maybe power if you're thinking about hierarchy within political blogospheres.