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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Weblogs: just a little stall in the market? « Previous | |Next »
June 15, 2003

There is an entry at the UK libertarian Samizdata.net that says webblogs are more a part of the marketplace than the democratic polity. The post says:

"Blogs are therefore something which empowers the individual, the blogger, regardless of the wishes, and therefore the votes, of a collective who might wish to have a say in what a blogger writes. The correct analogy is therefore the market place... a blog is a open air stall in a marketplace for ideas called the blogosphere. If you find the ideas we are 'selling' interesting (even if you do not agree with them) you will come back for more. If we horrify you or even worse, bore the pants off you, you will probably not come back. But we will write what we will write. There is nothing democratic about that... and long may it be so."

It is true that blogs are part of the marketplace. We pays our money to set them up and to keep the micro-media going. In setting up our stalls in the market we webloggers are also acting as competition for the corporate media.The small guys versus the big guys. Classic Hayek and all that.

So why is the weblog as a little stall of ideas not a part of democratic politics? Democratic politics for these libertarians:

"...refers to systems by which the people who control those collective means of coercion are chosen and made accountable via one of several methods of popular voting. For something to be 'democratic' therefore, it must be amenable to 'politics'. Therefore for a blog to be 'democratic' that does not mean it is empowering or that it disintermediates the state. In fact it means the state, which is to say democratic politics is very much involved."

However, the readers of weblogs are not involved in producing a weblog. What the reader does get is to choose whether or not they decide to come back and read the weblog again. Hence it is about the market. So weblogs are akin to stalls in the marketplace.

Stephen Dawson over at Australian libertarians (11.06.2003) follow suit. He states that the idea that blogs are democratic is superfical and that blogs are rightly offerings in a marketplace.

Weblogs are not just stalls in the marketplace. They are also part of the fourth estate and so they are part of the circulation of information in a federal democracy. As such they are about increasing citizen participation, dialogue and deliberation. See here. the public affairs weblogs are produced by citizens who are concerned with the good of the country, not just choosingtwhich stall in the market to buy ones package of ideas. Weblogs are part of a dialogic public reason and so an integral part of deliberative democracy.

Is connecting weblogs to democracy superficial as Stephen Dawson claims? No. There is a widespread and deep disenchantment with both the failure of politicians to keep their promises and the failure of the political process in liberal democracy to consistently deliver evident and assessable outcomes. We get lots of spin, publicity and media management. And lots of disenchantment with this. It is the disenchantment by citizens that takes us away from the superficial.

This article,which is based on BBC research, addresses citizen disenchantment with the political process. It says that:

"This disaffection appears to stem from a fundamental shift from ‘old tribal politics’ defined by party political allegiances, to a ‘new consumer politics’. People now play an active part in securing their rights in corporate life, but feel powerless to do this in civic life. Our research suggests people are becoming more assertive about wanting more transparent political transaction – rather than apathetic. They want information which is not defined by party politics but by the issues that interest them; they want to be able to judge what a politician promises; and if they disagree, they want to register this more than once in every five years."

This underscores the importance of reinvigorating civic life between elections The BBC plans to facilitate this navigating thei ssues of civic life, by providing a ‘database of democracy’ which people can use to find out who they have to contact on any given issue. The BBC says:

"We want to provide people with the opportunity and means to participate in democracy at local and national levels, not simply to observe it. This will be a service designed for action, not talk or ‘chat’. We believe the BBC is well placed to become a key facilitator in this emerging e-democracy world, using its strong trusted brand combined with its ability to attract audiences through both its online and broadcast output."

If only the ABC in Australia did something similar.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:37 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)
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Blogs are therefore something which empowers the individual, the blogger, regardless of the wishes, and therefore the votes, of a collective who might wish to have a say in what a blogger writes.

So democracy doesn't allow for the empowerment or free expression of the individual unless a "collective" assents? That doesn't sound like democracy to me. If they're proceeding from the premise of Market uber alles then of course blogs aren't part of civil society. Technophile libertarians don't believe in civil society, no matter how much they protest to the contrary. They should just come out and admit it instead of this subterfuge.

Many don't believe in the free expression of the individual either - just ask some of them about the workplace.