“Lakshmi Chaudry”:http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2485/ has an interesting piece in _In These Times_ on whether or not blogs can revolutionize progressive politics. Interesting – but, I think, based on a flawed premise. Chaudry’s argument, as I understand it, is that blogs aren’t going to be able to fulfil their promise of creating a vital new progressive movement, based on the netroots, unless it becomes more internally diverse, embracing women, minorities and (something which not many people focus on) people from the working class. Lakshmi seems to buy in, at least in part, to the argument that blogs can be an
bq. inherently democratic, interactive and communal medium, with the potential to instantaneously tap into the collective intellectual, political and financial resources of tens of millions of fellow Americans to create a juggernaut for social change.
Where she disagrees with lefty blog evangelists is in her belief that:
bq. any such strategy is unlikely to work if those in charge of crafting it—be they bloggers, politicians or so-called netizens—show little interest in expanding the reach of the progressive blogosphere to include the largest, most diverse audience possible. If the blogs are unable to bridge the class divide online, there is no reason to think they can create a grassroots movement that can do so in the real world.
This seems to me to be based on the flawed premise that blogs can be the heart of a genuine mass-movement, with appeal to working class voters as well as politics geeks. Blogs are still an elite phenomenon, with a relatively low readership among non-elites. There are a lot of inflated numbers being thrown around – the most “convincing estimate”:http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB111685593903640572-fCzpdsaoZQ6NyRKcqCtIKD0afZE_20060531.html?mod=rss_free that I’ve seen suggests that the biggest political blog around, the Daily Kos, had less than 1% of the readership of the New York Times in the middle of last year (it has probably grown since). Blogs are politically important, not because they are the nucleus of a mass movement, or a new form of radical democracy, but because they are read by journalists, federal law clerks, political activists and others who may then be influenced by them. While Chaudry is right that the blogosphere needs more diversity, this isn’t because a greater diversity of voices among bloggers is likely to make blogs more appealing, say, to working class voters. It’s because blogs do sometimes frame political questions for the media, and to the extent that they’re mostly written by white college educated males who are interested in technology, they’re liable to skew politics a but in favour of the interests of aforesaid college educated males, and against the interests of other groups with different priorities. It seems to me that political blogs are a little better than print media or TV at, say, taking trade unions seriously, but not so much that we should be patting ourselves on the back or anything.
