The Guardian on the dangers of political blogging:
Political blogging has come of age. At least, that was the idea behind the BBC’s Newsnight screening of a report by a high-profile blogger who writes under the pseudonym Guido Fawkes. His film argued that blogs provided more acute and independent political analysis than traditional journalism, owing to the absence of an editor, proprietor or regulator. Theatrically insisting on being filmed in darkness to maintain his supposed anonymity, “Fawkes” debated his thesis with Michael White of this newspaper.
It was a catastrophic performance, mainly because the blogger required continual correction on points of fact. He thereby illustrated blogging’s central characteristic danger. It is a democratic medium, allowing anyone to participate in political debate without an intermediary, at little or no cost. But it is a direct and not deliberative form of democracy. You need no competence to join in.
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Blogs are providers not of news but of comment. This would be a good thing if blogs extended the range of available opinion in the public sphere. But they do not; paradoxically, they narrow it. This happens because blogs typically do not add to the available stock of commentary: they are purely parasitic on the stories and opinions that traditional media provide. If, say, Polly Toynbee or Nick Cohen did not exist, a significant part of the blogosphere (a grimly pretentious neologism) would have no purpose and nothing to react to.
The great innovation of web-based commentary is that readers may select minutely the material they are exposed to. The corollary is that they may filter out views they find uncongenial. This is a problem for a healthy democracy, which depends on a forum for competing views.
The Guardian article is incorrect when the author says that blogs narrow available public opinion. Quite the opposite, they broaden the availability of opinion. But it is our individual decisions as to what we expose ourselves to that limits the impact of those thoughts.
Welcome to the Daily Me. Cass Sunstein covers this thuroughly in his book Republic.com (previews available through Google Book Search) and evaluates the impact of echo effects in a blog post here:
Over 60 citizens were brought together to explore three of the most controversial issues of the day: affirmative action, an international treaty to control global warming, and civil unions for same-sex couples. People in Boulder deliberated with others from Boulder, and people from Colorado Springs deliberated with people from Colorado Springs. Thus people were generally sorted into groups of like-minded people. Citizens expressed their views in three ways: anonymously, before deliberation began; in small groups, which deliberated and tried to reach consensus; and anonymously, after deliberation concluded.
Our key question was this: What would be the effect of deliberation on people’s views? There were three major findings.
(1) Liberals in Boulder became distinctly more liberal on all three issues. Conservatives in Colorado Springs become distinctly more conservative on all three issues. The result of deliberation was to produce extremism — even though deliberation consisted merely of a brief (15 minute) exchange of facts and opinions!
(2) The division between liberals and conservatives became much more pronounced. Before deliberation, the median view, among Boulder groups, was not always so far apart from the median view among Colorado Springs groups. After deliberation, the division increased — by a lot.
(3) Deliberation much decreased diversity among liberals; it also much decreased diversity among conservatives. After deliberation, members of nearly all groups showed, in their post-deliberation statements, far more uniformity than they did before deliberation.
The ability of individuals to limit what they read and hear and expose themselves to limits the diversity of their opinions, as well as their ability to back up their statements with facts.
This also comes back to the idea of an enforceable Blogging Code of Conduct and whether or not community is a viable alternative to a written code. Any community can develop its own unwritten code. When talking about the code’s audience I mentioned how my friends and I have a level of civility that exists merely through our relationships, no matter what our opinions may be. One also exists among my brothers and myself, it does not need to be written or spoken, but there is an understanding as to what is acceptable among us and how we react as a group to outside forces. Both of these codes exist in groups that force me to confront and engage opinions that I may not agree with. But they also make me engage those in a civil manner.
Bring this out to blogging. There may be an unwritten code of ethics shared among the members of Raising Kaine, but that code is going to be entirely different than one that may form among the members of RVABlogs. Because the content of both is different and one is insular while the other makes people have to engage and confront opinions and topics they may not otherwise choose to deal with. And while RK may have a strong community, it is the RVABlogs community that goes farther in helping develop its members and creating a sense of doing more than just nodding in agreement and preaching to the choir.
So can a Blogging Code of Conduct exist in a form that is widely incorporated and evenly enforced? No. Too many people are openly insular in their blogging. They have the blogs they read, the blogs they comment on, their group of friends who they blog with, and that is their core. That core already has its own code, why would they want to agree to a larger standard that is enforced by or merely involved blogs they want nothing to do with?
In order for a Code to work you have to break people of the Daily Me mold (among any other number of habits) and it’s just not going to happen. The best one can hope for is to be a decent person on their own site and from there find a sense of community that shares your values. Essentially you’re creating a Daily Me but you have to be willing to allow that Me to be open to ideas and conversations and debates. You don’t have to be willing to change what you feel, you just have to be respectful of what others present you. And it is within that community of like-open-minded individuals that one will find their code.
