Political blogging
All blogging is political it seems. Or not.
I met with Tim Ireland, the other night, in London. In many a way he's one of the most influential political bloggers in Britain, writing about the Sun, current affair and, ehr, MPs blogging. He gave me food for thought on the nature of blogging, i.e. what makes it different, and its possible effect on the political system.
In the first respect, he was saying that its' all about trust, transparency and the distribution of social intelligence. By that meaning, a blogger's influence is function of her capacity to build an argument which is based on demonstrable evidence, and stands the test of other bloggers' scrutiny (and the public as well). In this way a blogger builds trust, or reputation, and authority with that. Transparency ir required to coalesce this process, at different levels: IP, content, personae. That is you need to know where your traffic and comments are coming from, the author of posts/comments and where the evidence is to support an argument. The third element is the dynamic facet of transparency-enabled trust: social intelligence thrives in cyberspace where filters allow for the decanting of knowledge. That is, the logic of blogging filters in socially functional thoughts and filters out noise.
This has consequences for politics and to some extent also democracy. Well, we agreed that it does, in four overlapping respects. First, blogging is a form of glorified, old time journalism, by which the truth emerges most of the time from research, testing and critical, peer assessment. Second, blogging is a collective exercise in online deliberation, as bloggers come together as a public online. They judge other bloggers on the grounds of the evidence presented through rational scrutiny, and challenge authority with authority. Plus, on the Internet nobody knows you are a dog-blogger. Finally, this process leads to the collectivised and bottom-owned articulation of social intelligence, by which new meanings are built and new structure of knowledge, and power, created. Finally, related to that, blogging is a great campaigning toll, which exploits citizens' apathy and laziness, and is thoroughly embedded in search engine dynamics. It comes down to who comes up. And this is crucial for political campaigns.
Of course each of these models has flaws and each complements the others. But enough for now, I'll need to take a deep breath and think about what I just said. I'll leave it for tomorrow.
And this is not quite the terms in which we've discussed it, rather an academic rendition of the chat we had. Tom Watson chimed in briefly at the meeting, but I reckon he was too bored by blog-academic spiel to stay for long. Which sort of makes sense, as the 'chat' was 3-hours long; most of the other stuff from the meeting will be coming out, Steve Ward and I hope, as a research note for our research project. Well, thanks Tim, much appreciated.
I met with Tim Ireland, the other night, in London. In many a way he's one of the most influential political bloggers in Britain, writing about the Sun, current affair and, ehr, MPs blogging. He gave me food for thought on the nature of blogging, i.e. what makes it different, and its possible effect on the political system.
In the first respect, he was saying that its' all about trust, transparency and the distribution of social intelligence. By that meaning, a blogger's influence is function of her capacity to build an argument which is based on demonstrable evidence, and stands the test of other bloggers' scrutiny (and the public as well). In this way a blogger builds trust, or reputation, and authority with that. Transparency ir required to coalesce this process, at different levels: IP, content, personae. That is you need to know where your traffic and comments are coming from, the author of posts/comments and where the evidence is to support an argument. The third element is the dynamic facet of transparency-enabled trust: social intelligence thrives in cyberspace where filters allow for the decanting of knowledge. That is, the logic of blogging filters in socially functional thoughts and filters out noise.
This has consequences for politics and to some extent also democracy. Well, we agreed that it does, in four overlapping respects. First, blogging is a form of glorified, old time journalism, by which the truth emerges most of the time from research, testing and critical, peer assessment. Second, blogging is a collective exercise in online deliberation, as bloggers come together as a public online. They judge other bloggers on the grounds of the evidence presented through rational scrutiny, and challenge authority with authority. Plus, on the Internet nobody knows you are a dog-blogger. Finally, this process leads to the collectivised and bottom-owned articulation of social intelligence, by which new meanings are built and new structure of knowledge, and power, created. Finally, related to that, blogging is a great campaigning toll, which exploits citizens' apathy and laziness, and is thoroughly embedded in search engine dynamics. It comes down to who comes up. And this is crucial for political campaigns.
Of course each of these models has flaws and each complements the others. But enough for now, I'll need to take a deep breath and think about what I just said. I'll leave it for tomorrow.
And this is not quite the terms in which we've discussed it, rather an academic rendition of the chat we had. Tom Watson chimed in briefly at the meeting, but I reckon he was too bored by blog-academic spiel to stay for long. Which sort of makes sense, as the 'chat' was 3-hours long; most of the other stuff from the meeting will be coming out, Steve Ward and I hope, as a research note for our research project. Well, thanks Tim, much appreciated.
posted by wainer at 9:32 am
1 Comments:
You're entirely welcome... but any deny using any big words.
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