Just a little shameless self-promotion here – former Representative Dave Crooks does a radio show in Southern Indiana about Indiana politics on Saturday mornings. He was nice enough to invite me on to talk about blogging about Indiana politics. The show will air tomorrow (2/6/10) at 9 a.m., and you can listen live with streaming audio or archived audio. It’s out of my range, but for those in the area, the radio station is WAMW 107.9 FM/1580 AM out of Washington, IN.
Also on this edition will be Spencer Valentine of A Loyal Opposition.
Update The show archive is available here.
Remind me why Crooks is no longer in the House? Was there a scandal? Or did he just drop out to be a lobbyist?
No scandal, no lobbying to my knowledge. I think he had just served his time and stepped down.
Good job, D. Sometimes I find myself thinking about the social implications of political blogs and I seem to come to the same compound question each time: Do the opinions and activism we see on blogs present a situation where we oversample a particularly active segment of the population, and if so, is it a good thing or bad thing? In some ways, political activism on the internet is a giant echo chamber. But at the same time, do the people engaged in those activities have a greater claim to political influence because they put in the work? I think right now, activists are enjoying more power than they have probably wielded in the history of the nation; we are a far cry from the, “nattering naybobs of negativity” characterization to marginalize activism.
Political blogging is a huge potential benefit to society, as it analyzes and disseminates complex issues. It also serves as a check (the fourth-and-half-estate?) on political power. But it is also more easily muddied with factual inaccuracies, which detract from the benefits, or can more easily be co-opted for a specific agenda.
I don’t mean to imply that it should be regulated at all – I am just more interested in batting around the topic. I would like to think that the quality of internet blogging will continue to get better as more of the population grows up with the internet and brings with it a more skeptic eye.
One thing is for certain: if anyone anchors themselves to a specific ideology it is by their own volition as there are so many outlets to get differing views. I tend to read more conservative blogs than liberal blogs, because pseudo-anonymous affirmation of my own beliefs is incredibly boring and useless. I also do not have the hubris to pretend my views are optimized and couldn’t be improved through critical analysis.
Thanks Marc. I said in another forum that I figured the people who scream the loudest are usually the least informed. I wonder if blogshelp remove the excuse for being uninformed or merely create an illusion of information. A little of both, I suppose.
Now that we’re spitballing on a weekend, I am reminded of something I learned about Lewis Mumford, a scholar of technics – I probably only half understood it in the first place. But, he noted how technology created for a task had a range of motion (I think he used a different term, but it’s not coming to me) that went beyond the task it served. That extra range often helped to undermine the people who created the technology in the first place. Unintended consequences. The one I remember is that of monasteries using clocks to help them keep their prayers.
But, the clocks helped lead to the measurement of everything, the scientific method, capitalism (e.g. work shifts), and a lot of other things that undermined the monastic worldview.
So, I wonder if/how political blogs (or maybe you have to go as wide as the Internet as a whole) will undermine the purposes of those who first promoted them.
In the end, I think that we are generally pretty good at applying technology where it is most effective, whether intended or not. I like the range of motion construct. It seems that we have been confronted with the situation where technology threatens the status quo, and I think we usually avoid huge negative effects. Nuclear armament comes to mind where we may have screwed the pooch on tech, but the jury is still out, I think (only because we have avoided nuclear holocaust).
I guess I have faith in the ability for citizens to take some negative effects of advancement, but eventually draw a line where the tolerance fades. I think the internet falls into this category, where blogs that are too polemic lose impact.
I don’t see DailyKos or FreeRepublic impacting votes all that much since most of those readers are firmly planted in one camp or another. And if you aren’t a poli-junkie or polemicist, they don’t offer much to the independent voter. Information behaves like most markets – if you can facilitate the necessary assumptions – free information, many competitors, ease of entry and exit – then the market does a terrific job of assigning value and success.