More about blogging and democracy

Perhaps the most important part of the Democratic National Convention blogging is yet to begin; trying to figure out what happened, what worked, what didn’t, what convention blogging, political blogging and community blogging is really all about and should be all about.

We are already starting to see various attempts to make sense of it all. Charlie Cooper found that the bloggers didn’t live up to his expectations. Quite a few people commented there, and elsewhere, here, for example, that Cooper’s expectations appear completely unrelated to that of anyone involved with blogs.

The New York Times, attempted to fit bloggers into the Fashion Section. I guess being a blogger is fashionable now. Geek Chic?

While New York Times/CNET News.com casts bloggers as fashionable cyberhayseeds, there is a more interesting and important discussion going on. In an earlier entry here, Jon Lebkowsky pointed to an entry by Cameron Barrett. Cam built and ran the Clark Community Network and has come up with the best commentary yet on the whole experiment with bloggers at the convention.

In a nutshell, he contrasted Broadcast politics with participatory politics. It is a contrast that makes a lot of sense to me and fits well with the discussions we’ve often had here. He comments “I really wish they [the bloggers] had put more effort into interacting with the people who were not at the Convention … it was not organized in any kind of fashion that made sense for the readers coming to their blogs … the Convention Committee failed to set expectations for the kind for reports coming from bloggers”

I think these comments are more on the mark and insightful than most of the stuff I’ve seen written about the blogging of the convention. It matches very much, my feelings, as a blogger that was there.

As I try to frame my answer to this, I find the questions that Gabe Wachob asks in Uncorked a good starting point:

“How exactly are political blogs "two-way communication"?”

I think this hits on the issue that I was struggling early on with at the convention in my Send Me post. There is nothing about political blogs that make them “two-way communications” or make them “participatory democracy”. Through the use of comments, trackbacks, blogrolls, and other types of linking, they are tools that are very well suited to being used for participatory democracy. However, you could do participatory democracy using smoke signals or Morse code as well.

Cam is right, we bloggers needed to get more interaction with people who were not at the convention. I tried, Cam, honest, I tried. There were convention watching parties. These would have been a great event for people around the country to participate. I invited people to participate via the blog and many emails, but got almost no response.

Why was that? First, I’m not sure how much the Kerry campaign embraces participatory democracy yet. I still hope they will embrace it more and more, and I am pleased to see signs that the DNC is starting to embrace participatory democracy through blogs, Meetups, etc.

I know that Gov. Dean embraces participatory democracy. He spoke a lot about two way communications in campaigns at many gatherings during the convention, and talked about how DFA read many blogs to get a sense at what people were really thinking.

I guess at this point, my thoughts are that for so long, politics in the United States have been too broadcast oriented, and not participatory enough. Inviting thirty ordinary citizens to the Democratic National Convention is an important first step in rebuilding democracy in this country. However, politicians and citizens are so unused to participatory democracy, it will take more than thirty people writing their thoughts for four days to change the system.

One of the first people to interview me as a blogger at the convention asked how I would measure my success. I said it wouldn’t be in terms of a news scoop or a brilliant analysis of a speech. It wouldn’t be in terms of being deemed fashionable. True success for me would be if I could just get a few more people actively involved in participatory democracy. I think I was successful with that, but just in case, I’m going to keep on trying.

Posted by Aldon Hynes at August 1, 2004 8:06 PM | TrackBack