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May 26, 2005
Weblogs and the networks formed by bloggers are now a integral part of online culture and the information superhighways of communicative capitalism. The webloggers are Web travelers by necessity.
So what is the extent and impact of blogging in political life in Australia?
What is clear to me is that blogs have not replaced the institutional and ideological functions of the old corporate media. Nor do they primarily filter news about a specific topic to an interested audience. The role of bloggers in the selection and therefore initial construction of political events as news is severely limited. But they--the issue related blogs---can and do intervene in the production of the meaning of political events in the form of an op.ed commentary. They are a part of the excess of meaning around political events.
These forms of personal publishing are also spaces in which to reflect on these events, and they can also provide a form of resistance to what Andrew Bartlett has called "the dismal level and nature of information about political matters available through the (increasingly narrow) mainstream media." Bartlett is dead about the dismality of the political conversation. Political tribalism-my lot is better than your lot suck boo--has a lot with that low level.
One place to turn to begin to answer the question about the extent and impact of blogging in political life is the recent BlogTalkDownunder Conference. It has come and gone and the reflections have started.
If we bounce of Andrew Bartlett's abstract at the BlogTalkDownunder Conference we can say that the strength of the issue-related blogs is that they can, and do counter the minimal diversity of opinions, the 'dumbing down' of political discourse through existing mainstream media, and the mainstream media's treatment of politics as a combination of soap opera and pseudo-sporting contest.
Hence they make a contribution to the civic dialogue. But we should not get too carried away by that contribution to debate, dissent, free speech and participatory democracy. Do the blogs strongly impact on the media, political advisors/researchers and activists? I doubt it.
What we can say is that the political weblogs in Australia have avoided mirroring the reactive, not reflective, aspects of the corporate media; and the tendency towards clusters of weblogs forming echo chambers.
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