Several days ago, I finished a final draft of an essay entitled “Networked Politics: Deliberation, Mobilization and Everything In-Between” to be published as a chapter in the Networked Publics book edited by Kazys Varnelis. The first draft was written with my co-author, Mark Kann, a senior poli-sci professor at USC. Now, after I rewrote it, it goes to the editor and we’ll see whether it needs some further revisions or not. Academic publishing, especially in North American setting, is a meticulous and very impractical business. It pursues quality to the max — not only quality of substance (research) but also of writing/style/grammar. It needs a year or more just to get one small piece to be published. Let alone the book. Every single piece goes through blind pe-er reviews, sometimes double, and it goes back and forth to you and the editor until everybody’s satisfied! Well, what can I do? I chose to be a scholar, nobody forced me to do this so I should follow the rules and so far I don’t get real troubles (yet) in publishing. And when I don’t want to conform with traditions and rules, I’ll just ramble freely in this blog, hehe.

So, it was a big relief that I finally finished. It’s a long essay and while being empirical, it’s a conceptual writing. Since it may put you to sleep easily, if I copy the whole essay, here I copy one section of it. It represents perhaps only 15% of the whole essay.

POLITICAL BLOGGING

Defined as “a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally in reverse chronological order)” weblogs, or shortened as blogs, allow for instant, chronological, updated, and frequent communication of information. Blogging platform allows bloggers to create recordable online journals as well as comments of their audiences, both of which are indexed and searchable by search engines, offering a new a new way for communicating and discovering social metadata. This provides advantages over other forms for communicating and providing information such as conventional websites, e-mails, forums, and mailing lists.

In the domain of politics, blogs only took up in early 2004, inline with the rapid and progressive uses of the Internet during the United States Presidential campaign. Even with only 9% of Internet users reporting that they read frequently or sometimes during the election campaign, blogs started to be seen as being potentially significant to politics. Before that year, bloggers and their blogs were not yet perceived as having any significant political role, especially when they are compared to other players in domestic politics and mainstream or mass media, mostly statistics show that even the most popular blogs received only a tiny proportion of the web traffic that major media outlets attract.

One of the most notable stories of political blogging is the story of Howard Dean’s Blog for America. It was exemplary in showing how a blog could be used for building social networks of political support. Dean’s blogging phenomenon and a rapid rise in the popularity and proliferation of blogs marked 2004 as an important year in the history of blog. And in the subsequent years, blogging has become much more popular, with about 57 million American adults read blogs in 2006.

Political blogs, while do not occupy the biggest portion of blogosphere, exist and some of them are among the most popular blogs. A progressive American blog Daily Kos, for example, attracts about 600,000 visitors per day and has between 14 million and 24 visits per month, placing it as one of the most popular collaborative-blogs in the world.

Some observers see blogs as a catalyst for change. It is called people’s media and an empowering tool for society. Some dub the rise of blogs as the beginning of a citizen journalism era, where the marginalized can at last play a greater role in making rather than merely consuming news. Others even believe that public debate would be dramatically revitalized if politicians would all start blogging.

In reality, does blog really play its role in empowering society? Is it a real breakthrough in online politics?

We identify several problems in the current practice of political blogging. First, even in the United States where a number of blogs grow significantly each day, the blogosphere suffers from the unequal distribution of readers across the array of blogs. While there are over a million bloggers in the US posting approximately 275,000 new items daily, the median blogger has almost no political influence as measured by traffic or hyperlinks. The distribution of links and traffic is heavily skewed with only a handful bloggers getting most readers.

If blogosphere is to be seen as an exemplary public sphere where everybody’s voice is to be heard, then this tendency shows that it is not. Yet, this could be also seen as a selection process weeding out the “bad” from the “desirable.” Though, a limited observation shows that the top bloggers are not always necessarily better than the rest.
Second, some studies show that rather than creating a new public (blogo)sphere, bloggers tend to be polarized along ideological lines.

Adamic and Glance’s study on American political blogosphere, as illustrated in this map, finds that:

“liberals and conservatives linking primarily within their separate communities, with far fewer cross-links exchanged between them. This division extended into their discussions, with liberal and conservative blogs focusing on different news articles, topics, and political figures.”

Some question arises: Isn’t the polarization of American blogosphere a mirror of the society itself? Does the blogosphere cause this polarization? And is the polarization it causes substantially greater than through other media?

It is not easy to answer these questions. We can hypothesize that linking and the culture of linking in blogosphere may create more exposure to divergent ideas than people otherwise experience in real space, and thus, it is not a contributing cause of existing political polarization. Other hypothesis is that with the availability of vast social metadata, one can easily search for or find information that confirms what she/he already believes. This would facilitate and enhance polarization. However, the same social metadata would also increase serendipitous exposure to information that one disagrees or one is not looking for, which would produce different result. Whether which effect is dominant, further investigation is needed.

In line with the polarization issue, other problem is that there is no central organization to blogosphere with little consensus among the bloggers/readers with regard to many key issues. This corresponds with the Tower of Babel tendency in cyberspace where voices tend to be so exclusionary as to be pointless to customary audience. Yet, to be positive, this tendency implies that blogosphere can potentially encourage more genuine individual voices to emerge and real dialogues to be created.

Another constraint is that most bloggers are part-timers thus blogging activity is almost exclusively a voluntary venture. Most blogs are not maintained professionally most blogs are not maintained professionally. Most bloggers do not have resources and capacity to investigate prior to publishing their opinions. Thus, from the journalism point of view, while postings in blogosphere can be as or even more critical than those in mainstream media, the credibility of blog entries cannot meet that of articles in mainstream media. On the other hand, bloggers’ voluntary activity can also be seen as an affirmative energy for regular people to voice their opinions without going through an exhausted filtering of traditional journalism that often bars some critical-unconventional-controversial voices from the professional media sphere.

Here we see that far from hypes that emerge around the rise of political blogging, the blogosphere is not and never be an ideal political sphere for everybody to speak up and find a common ground in rational communicative discourse. Many voices, but who are listening? Who are heard? Many speak up, but do they communicate?

However, without being utopian, we can claim that political blogging does expand the political sphere from the elites to the commoners, more effectively than previous Internet applications such as websites and portals can ever do. While might not reach deliberative democracy, interactive communications between bloggers and non-blogger readers/commentators are facilitated with such ease in blogosphere. These communicative spheres are not and will never create one homogenous public sphere. But they do create and expand the networked political spheres for internet users to participate in any mode they wish for.