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Bloghetto: official vs. independent weblogs

5 comments on Bloghetto: official vs. independent weblogs

Bloghetto: official vs. independent weblogs
: Jonathan Chait of The New Republic complains on his Dean-o-phobe blog that the Dean campaign is creating a comfy online island in its weblogs:

One of the most disturbing things about Dean and his hard-core supporters is that they give the impression that they know nothing at all of why President Bush is successful, and therefore what it takes to beat him. Read the pro-Dean blogs, and the you come away with the view that Bush is strong because he’s ruthless and has lots of money, and therefore if the Democrats are also ruthless and raise lots of money, they can beat him. This ignorance is compounded by the fact that many Deanies seem to exist in a isolated cultural milieu in which everybody is secular, socially liberal, and antiwar. They can’t fathom why those things might hurt Dean in a general election because they don’t ever talk to or read anybody who thinks differently. Dean’s Internet networking–which has had lots of positive effects on American politics–has probably intensified this cloistering, by creating intellectual ghettos on the web where true believers can interact, undisturbed by those who don’t share their faith.

Gene over at Harry’s Place agrees:

Well, yes, which is one reason to avoid those cyber-ghettos. And it’s one reason I appreciate the wide range of opinions reflected in the posts and comments at Harry’s Place. I’m pleased that– no matter what you believe– you can’t get away with intellectual laziness here. Many ideological web sites are devoted largely to carricaturing the opposing side; it’s hard to do that here because someone from the opposing side will usually call you on it.

Right.

: Official weblogs, by the very fact that they are annointed as as official, must give the party line (see my earlier post on the essentially and necessarily one-way and propagandistic nature of an official weblog). You go to the official blog to find out what is official. They try to influence down.

Independent weblogs, on the other hand, have more freedom to discuss and argue. You go to them to see what the people say. They try to influence across and up. Their independence is their value.

: UPDATE: Dave Winer went to see Dean last night. His post isn’t up because of a rabid bot going after his server. But the post is up on his RSS feed. A quote:

There were 150 people in the room, mostly it was about lies, bedtime stories, telling people what they want to hear. No minds activated. Some good lines, a glimmer that minds may have played a role in the Dean campaign at one time, but not today. Now they’re trying to get elected, and I believe in doing so are guaranteeing that they won’t. If you’re looking for an airbrushed guy, Clark is much stronger. I don’t know why people care how much money Dean has raised, that’s just going to buy commercials. I’d love to see one of the pols use their money to solve some problems now, win or lose. Put some teeth behind We Love The Internet and The Internet Loves Us.

5 responses to “Bloghetto: official vs. independent weblogs”

  1. Joel Avatar
    Joel

    Dean’s intellectual ghetto on the web is not that different from the intellectual ghetto that prevails on college campuses, where everyone assumes that everyone else has virtually the same political opinion on everything outside their narrow specialties. If I were running for office and most of my fervent followers were from college campuses, I’d be very pessimistic about my chances in a general election.

  2. MattS Avatar
    MattS

    Gene and Chait both have a legitimate point, that Dean cloisters himself somewhat in a sheen of groupthink (unlike The New Republic, which would never do anything like that). But I’m a little perplexed by the assumption (or implication) that the Dean blog’s positive focus on Dean is a problem so much as a limit.
    The assumption underlying of the ‘it’s a problem’ school is that the Dean blog is the primary source of information for most readers. I’m not sure this is the case. I read the Dean blog, but it’s not like it’s the only blog I read. Much of the conversation in the Dean blog is interesting, if a bit rah rah for my tastes. It’s certainly enriching at any rate, and links to articles and ads that do not agree with the standard Dean line. The blog is ‘on message’, but certainly is taking part of the conversation in the blogosphere and the media universe. (I don’t support Dean, by the way.) Most of the people who read the Dean blog probably also read the New York Times online; this is not to say that the New York Times isn’t biased (that’s a different question altogether), but that Blogforamerica Deaniacs do get multiple sources of information. It’s also probably true that the more interesting and influential people on Blog for America read multiple sources of information and bring a more balanced perspective. Balance just brings credibility.
    I don’t think I’m disputing your point so much as saying that blogs provide a rich diversity of information and analysis, and picking on one blog for having one well-disclosed perspective would be a much more devastating criticism if that were the only source of information around. Cyberghetto-ization would imply that Dean folk never hear anything but praise for Dean; I doubt this is the case, even on the Dean blog itself.
    On the question of whether official blogs and communities like the Free Republic exert a partisanizing influence on politics, well, there I think it’s premature to judge. We live in a highly partisan era, and it’s not clear that the internet has anything to do with that, nor is it clear that the internet has accentuated partisanship any more than Bush’s relentlessly right-wing agenda and the angry liberal backlash. I tend to think that blogs and the internet exert a deep pull on the politics of this country towards the openness of information, and the vicious fighting around this deep pull is seen as increased partisanship. But what do I know?

  3. Richard Avatar
    Richard

    Got into some discussions with other left wing sites and one was so frustrated that I wouldn’t go along with the bush lying 24/7 they simply blocked me from posting. Now, that’s fine by me as it wasn’t my site, but if you can’t hear a contrarian statement, exactly what are you going to learn or how are you going to test your own thoughts against someone who really disagrees with you? Lucianne.com is much like this on the right side but there seems to be more of this on the left side.

  4. John Avatar
    John

    Lucianne.com doesn’t block posters, AFAIK, for political content of replies, but will block for dropping F-bombs or similar words, or for continuing to directly reply to other posters. But it is interesting to see some of the right wing comments on certain stories, like the Rush Limbaugh medical records ruling thread from earlier today, or on some other threads where people post replies at times without even bothering to look at the article refrenced and only go by the name of the publication (so that a not well-known conservative writer appearing, for example, on the website of the Washington Post gets slammed because, well because it’s the Washington Post, which means that person has got to be a liberal).
    A lot of those people are off in their own ghetto of political thought, where they associate only with like-minded people, publications, TV shows and/or websites and refuse to accept any divergence of opinion, even from other conservatives. They therefore doom themselves to future shock and biterness when things don’t go their way, though in 2004 it looks like it’s the same type of people on the left suffering who will be the ones suffering from “Pauline Kael Syndrome” come November.

  5. Roger L. Simon Avatar
    Roger L. Simon

    What is all this blabla-hooray about Dean being the first pol to “get” the Internet. So what? That’s like praising someone for being the first to use “direct mailers.” What does it have to do with his policies? Surely no one thinks a President has even a minute to the check blogs before he acts on legislation or war. Let’s get serious.