Dissensus was spawned by bloggers. All of this is the offshoot of a specific constellation around Matt Ingram, Simon Reynolds and K-Punk in 2003-4. I should think that the general consensus would be that they're pretty important. But there's nothing quite like blogging to inflate your sense of self-importance.
I think it's mostly an important form of therapy. It's certainly better than alcohol or SSRIs.
Ollie OTM.
i like the Nomad quotes that littlebird has been citing.
political blogs are a useful way of extending a conversation, people you wouldn't get to meet in the pub, etc. in many cases not much more, though certainly no less.
if someone can make even one little ripple, that's good enough for me.
blogs maintained by academics or activists can be a particularly good read in this area.
i like when politicians themselves have a good understanding of blogging, as it's a way of (for example) the people they represent being able to reach them alongside all the other ways constituents have traditionally reached their representatives (via surgery or letter or what have you), such as the British MP Tom Watson.
a blog like Benn loxo du taccu has, anecdotally, got a lot of people really turned onto world musics.
i do want to quote a couple of posts from Normblog (and as is the case with points Nomad and littlebird raise, Normblog is a retired academic and someone who has seen his name in print, he's the sort of alpha blogger that littlebird was referencing), one of the most widely read UK political blogs. he's responding to his friend Oliver Kamm, who used to blog - on politics, economics and culture - away from his day job in finance, until his blogging got him noticed to the extent that he is now a leader writer for
The Times (Kamm had written a book on foreign policy whilst blogging as well, so had already had fingers in different pies before he started the gig with the Thunderer).
It's another spin of the same wheel. Oliver Kamm sets out his view on the all-round negative effects of political blogging in today's Guardian. As I said in my previous discussion of his arguments, I agree with him that much of what passes for political exchange in the blogosphere - a term I for my part have no trouble with - doesn't encourage the careful weighing of opposing viewpoints (see also here). Still, I remain puzzled by three features of Oliver's argument...
Second, Oliver writes that blogs are 'purely parasitic'. Yes, true, they depend on the press and other media, but this in itself is presumably not an offence against democratic debate. So do other ordinary, non-blogger citizens depend on these same sources. There seems no reason special to bloggers why they should be disqualified from discussing what has come to them via the media...
From all of which I conclude that Oliver wrongly generalizes from one of the regrettable features of blogospheric debate to a damning of the medium as a whole.
it's only a short post, available
here (if anyone's arsed to read it: i deliberately cut out some of Norm's argument to whet the appetite).
same again, really, with
I'm not sure exactly how valuable a resource blogs and blogging are to democratic deliberation and debate. It's probably too early to form a confident judgement. But I do think they are such a resource and so I disagree with what Oliver Kamm says in this post...
But if, from a democratic point of view, there is this shortcoming of debate on the blogs, it needs to be dealt with practically by trying to improve the culture of Internet discussion. There is nothing about the medium as such, about the sheer availability of this new space for debate, one open to much larger numbers of people and to every point of view, that impoverishes democracy.
that post is available
here.
on a vaguely related topic, i'm a bit interested in what free web content at newspaper homepages is doing for the print paid physical daily editions (i'm a guy who often has the ritual of his paper), in the long run certainly. i think i remember a thread on same here where we discussed advertising.
the media crit at
The Reader, Michael Miner, is often quite interesting on these sorts of things.