My piece on the netroots and the Democratic party has just come out in the _Boston Review_ (free webby version “here”:http://www.bostonreview.net/BR31.5/farrell.html, but I heartily encourage people to “subscribe”:http://bostonreview.net/subscribe.html to the real magazine; it’s smart and filled with wonderful things). People who want to comment on or respond to the piece (it’s a broadly positive take on the netroots, but argues that they need to become more self-consciously ideological) can do so here.
{ 13 comments }
Seth Finkelstein 09.25.06 at 1:14 pm
Well, let me demonstrate “viewpoints that are strongly held and trenchantly expressed” :-)
“Debates that used to be the preserve of a small, self-perpetuating group of pundits, pollsters, and policymakers are now being opened up to a much wider group.”
Bah. From down here, it looks very much like a “small, self-perpetuating group” too, except there’s some tiny bit of shifting around. Yes, in a strict sense, going from e.g. a Gang Of 100 to a Gang Of 200, IS *DOUBLING* OH MY GOD ITS TWICE AS MUCH, EXPANDING *100%*, GO GO BLOGS … but to anyone not a part of that inner circle, it’s meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
“enable individuals to take control of the means of communication for themselves and create content that is immediately available to millions. … Blogs are fundamentally decentralized …”
Complete utter barking nonsense. If you aren’t part of some system, YOU DON’T GET HEARD. Proof: Where-Are-The-Women.
I stopped reading seriously here, and relegated it to the genre of blog-evangelism, making the same marketing arguments.
Yes, I know, there’s some important political points here. You’re a smart man. But let’s put it this way, the amount of wishful thinking and willing suspension of disbelief makes it very hard to sort the fact from the fiction.
Henry 09.25.06 at 2:24 pm
Seth – I know that you have strong and frequently expressed views on this topic – but I also think that you’re wilfully ignoring something that’s happening that’s very important. Yes – as discussed in the article, blogs have some real internal hierarchies – but there is a degree of openness to them that there isn’t, say, in the New Republic. When you say that the absence of women bloggers doesn’t point to the presence of people involved in some kind of system, I suspect that you’re flat-out wrong and that the forms of discrimination here are considerably more subtle (and have more to do, I suspect, with the kinds of issues that are regarded as ‘political’ and ‘interesting.’) Fair enough that you want to appoint yourself as a scourge to the net-evangelists – but there’s a baby there in the bathwater whose squallings you seem determined to ignore.
Seth Finkelstein 09.25.06 at 3:00 pm
Henry, my point is that Where-Are-The-Women(In Power) puts a very hard limit on how much “democracy”, how much real change there is – it’s an obvious, concrete, order-of-magnitude measurement distinguishing between supposed great leaps and arthritic staggering.
I’m actually skeptical there’s much of a new openness, when one does the baseline comparison properly. The arguments I’ve seen for this often fallaciously compare a “closed” print publication to an “open” blog, ignoring that there are also plenty of blogs which are as top-down and closed as anything that’s come before. There’s community sites, but that’s a fairly minor innovation – I recall how Talk Radio was once similarly hyped as the “democratic” “decentralized” voice-of-the-people (and we know what happened there …).
I’ve hardly appointed myself as a scourge to the net-evangelists. If I had, I’d start an anti-hype site, there’s so much material … . I’ve turned down a project like that, too much work, not worth the personal attacks (I recommend “dead20.com”, for the tech version).
I just find the topic very problematic, and occasionally sound-off – a bad habit, given the risk/reward ratio. I do fear that liberals/intellectuals who buy into blog evangelism are participating in something that’s possibly overall quite harmful to what they’d like to see. But where’s the profit in saying that?
gmoke 09.25.06 at 3:07 pm
There’s a new book out on Stewart Brand and Whole Earth that is the subject of an article in the 9/25/06 NYTimes. It would be good for somebody studying the blog phenomena to go back and look at the WELL and the Whole Earth community to see what the roots of the netroots very well may be. Howard Rheingold’s _Virtual Community_ and his further work with smartmobs.com and the book _Smart Mobs_ would also be useful.
As someone who has spent years going to the brown bag lunches with major journos at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, I can tell you these guys really don’t get it, really don’t want to get it, and really dislike the fact that their model of journalism and opinion doesn’t quite work any more. Last year, Doyle McManus of LA Times said at one of these events that he expected the present business model to last another generation and my jaw dropped. Is he really that clueless? I’ve seen Alex Jones, dean of the Shorenstein, grow visibly angry because Deborah Howell was called a c*nt in emails. That’s beyond the pale to him but Howell’s complete misrepresentation of readers’ issues with the Washington Post never gets mentioned. Pot and kettle? Privilege? Mote in the eye? I don’t know but the reflex response to bloggers is dismissive, diminishment, and the smell of fear.
The netroots are trying to build a political party within the shell of the Democratic party. They feel little or no representation from the existing Dems and less backbone on central issues. This is extremely difficult. However, most bloggers also don’t understand that politics takes time. They rush from one crisis to another – the Path to 9/11, Clinton is Crazed, Bush’s latest outrage, torture, Allen’s lies about his ancestry – and waste time and energy on the daily dust up which could be more productively used in doing real groundwork and remembering that legislation takes time. Harry Reid has to wait for the right moment in order to strike all the time being criticized for doing nothing. This is naive.
I am also habitually leery of concentrating on politics, candidates, elections, and legislation to change things down here on the ground. I went to YearlyKos to exhibit my Solar Survival Show and convince others to go to local events such as the over 3700 farmers markets that happen weekly around the USA throughout the growing season with simple solar demos and energy efficiency devices. Here is a core constituency which could adopt these techniques and make real economic and social changes within their households today and tomorrow, changes that could have deep repercussions in general society without a “leader” or legislation or government funding. These changes could drive leaders, legislation and funding if done right. There is little response to my ideas but that’s OK. I’ll keep pushing.
Politics and ideology are one aspect but real change happens on the street. The blogs and netroots can help make that street level change but they are not yet fully awake to the possibility.
On my dkos diary, http://gmoke.dailykos.com, I publish a series on WWII posters which have relevance today, my solar experiments, and the notes I take on pertinent books I read. I am also part of a meta-group that has been pooling resources and information on election integrity, the core issue in our “democracy” today because if we don’t have elections we can trust we don’t have a democracy at all. This is something that, again, is not fully understood by the netroots or the public. As for the journalists, as far as I know, I am the only one who ever mentions the issue at such venues as the Shorenstein lunches. The journos don’t really care as long as the shadow show is entertaining.
What is important about the blogs and netroots are the connections between the people, the people I’ve encountered online and never seen in person and those with whom I’ve had “f2f” meetings. I’ve been online for about 15 years and got online to be on the WELL. The online world has expanded my real time, physical world enormously. It is those connections in an expanded personal/public sphere which will transform the political commons, the polis (thank you Charles Olson) and the res publica.
We have flame war politics now. It’s like some alt.net newsgroup arguing wookies versus ents and the journos, opinion makers, and politicians haven’t caught on to it. They don’t even know what a flame war is. Daniel Okrent hadn’t heard of Godwin’s Law until I mentioned it. Print culture is meeting net culture and the collision is ugly. Ask Senator Stevens about the tubes and see what I mean (but it would probably not be wise to ask him when he’s wearing his Incredible Hulk tie.)
Henry 09.26.06 at 10:14 am
Seth – the original version of the piece had some discussion of problems of unequal voice within the blogosphere which was cut for reasons of space (it still mentions the massive preponderance of white, male middle class voices). But as said, I think that you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Granted, the blogosphere and Internets aren’t some sort of universal solvent that magically dissolve existing power relations etc. Granted, they have their own internal quasi-hierarchies. But they are better than what came before, and better _in principle_. Simply put, to be Marty Peretz and own the New Republic, you have to marry an heiress. To start a blog, you need next to zero in the way of start-up costs, and not that much maintenance. Getting noticed is trickier – but the quasi-hierarchies that exist in the blogosphere are based on attention, rather than more material versions of power. That means that you can do an end-run around them far more easily. And here’s a prediction – the area of the blogosphere that is arguably most dominated by women – the “mommyblogs” are going to become much more politically important over the next couple of years (they’re already political, although some of em, not all of em, don’t realize it). So fair enough that there’s a lot of hype and blog evangelism. Fair enough that I’m concentrating on the positive side in this piece. But I’m absolutely convinced there is something important happening here – and in the end I’m in agreement with Yochai on these questions, rather than with you. History will tell which is right, I suppose …
gmoke – that’s all very interesting. I hadn’t known about Rheingold’s connection with the Whole Earth people until I showed the slightly tacky Bob Cringely Nerds 2.0 documentary to my students.
Seth Finkelstein 09.26.06 at 9:26 pm
Henry, I have heard the blog-evangelism argument. Believe me, I HAVE HEARD IT!. Part of what convinces me that there’s a certain amount of rose-colored glossing over empirical evidence, is that I’ll engage the argument, respond to the point – and just get it repeated back to me as a rebuttal.
“To start a blog, you need next to zero in the way of start-up costs, and not that much maintenance.”
And like free advice being worth what you paid for it, zero start-up costs will give you zero audience (note people who claim zero start-up costs are usually omitting the marketing expenses, which are decidedly non-zero). My contention: The evangelists are *WRONG* here. Your next point – which is the core of the dispute – is incorrect: “but the quasi-hierarchies that exist in the blogosphere are based on attention, rather than more material versions of power. That means that you can do an end-run around them far more easily.”. I would argue that (remember, this is a comment box, not a Ph.D. thesis, so I’m stating it briefly) it’s much truer to say that the attention is not at all “far more easily”, but very roughly replaces the production costs, so that we end up *overall* in the same place, with a few *shifts*. Note this means that in the tiny tiny pundit elite, the shift has winners and losers. The winners run around saying “Yay! It’s a revolution! We’ve never had it so good, it’s a New Era, where anyone can prosper – just look at *me*!”. The losers bemoan how society is going to hell in a handbasket. But it’s all a game of musical chairs played among an extremely small percentage of the population – NOT any sort of deep democratic discourse.
This is not refuted by repeating the Zero Production argument. That has been addressed.
Your article is in fact seems to be talking about one aspect of the current shift, from a rather depressing viewpoint, once the blog evangelism is discarded. I’d summarize it as proceeding from how ordinary liberalism has been gerrymandered out of big media outlets. So there’s a market imbalance, given that ordinary liberalism is still maybe 35% of the population, while perhaps 5% of the media. So that provides some niches for the underserved market, which are being taken up by blogs, since they haven’t been completely monopolized yet, because they’re too trivial overall.
That’s a fine bit of political media studies. But the implications are quite different depending on whether one attributes it to a reaction to media gerrymandering, versus some sort of techno-optimism.
Scroop Moth 09.26.06 at 10:30 pm
Henry
Your post skimmed past the tonic effect of blogs on press conferences and TV commentary, which seem to have stepped up their games in response to the rhetorical and analytic competition. Who is going to sit through serveral rounds of 5-minute commercials to watch an oft-promised and over-teased bit of Hilllary derision, when you can see pages of stychomachia with a single click?
Chris Matthews and Keith Olberman recently have become much more demanding of their viewers. Even press conferences seem less superficial.
Henry 09.27.06 at 11:09 am
Seth – I think you’re starting from entirely the wrong place here – your claim that attention hierarchies are as bad as more formal hierarchies in reinforcing inequalities of power just doesn’t seem to me to be sociologically sustainable. Categorizing any positive claims for the consequences of the Internet as being utopian techno-optimism, which is what you seem to be doing unless I’m sorely mistaken, is just as unhelpful as blithe blog evangelism in helping us figure out what is happening (Puddleglum is Pollyanna’s reverse mirror-image).
Seth Finkelstein 09.27.06 at 2:48 pm
Responding to: “your claim that attention hierarchies are as bad as more formal hierarchies in reinforcing inequalities of power just doesn’t seem to me to be sociologically sustainable.”
1. Where-Are-The-Women?
2. Power Law
That is, we see roughly *the same* inequalities in gender/race/class/etc., and huge, enormous, inequalities in attention. So how can you write what you did above? To me, these two simple aspects (and remember, this is a short comment, not a book, so I know the power law is per-topic, etc, I’m skipping over those minor refinements), are, if not utterly dispositive, extremely strong evidence to shift the burden of proof back onto those saying it’s different this time. This is what I mean by saying the argument has been *engaged*, and it just gets repeated back (I know, I’ve repeated myself – because the point hasn’t advanced).
Regarding techno-optimism, I’m saying the basic blog evangelism claims are *wrong*, and their rationale is techno-optimism, as shown by the fact that when skeptical analysis is made, that skepticism is brushed aside. Believing wrong claims because they are emotionally appealing is very understandable, but I doubt it helps.
In specific, consider “Liberalism mostly driven from big media, ghettoized to blogs” versus “Blogs drive a resurgence of liberalism” – the implications are dramatically different.
Henry 09.27.06 at 5:01 pm
Seth – in response to your points.
Where are the Women? Answer: underrepresented as in other forms of opinion media. But if you really want to make the case that blogs are as bad or worse than what preceded them, you have your work cut out. As an entirely unscientific test case, I grabbed the nearest form of elite opinion publication to me – Foreign Affairs magazine’s most recent issue. There were seventeen substantive articles, of which precisely one was by a woman. If you want to count in book reviews etc, you have 23 to 1.
Power Laws: Dan Drezner and I have some data suggesting that the political blogosphere is characterized by a lognormal distribution of links, not a power law. See our paper, linked from my website. Our data is a couple of years old, and interpretation is always tricky on these things, but what work there is suggests that lognormal distributions may result from linkage models that aren’t just rich-get-richer, but allow new entrants to rise to the top sometimes etc.
So I simply don’t see that your evidence supports the strong negative implications about attention ‘hierarchies’ being as bad as more conventional ones that you would like to draw.
Seth Finkelstein 09.27.06 at 6:11 pm
1) “But if you really want to make the case that blogs are as bad or worse than what preceded them, you have your work cut out.”
Umm, why? Isn’t this asserting that the skeptic bears the burden of proof, that all the evangelist needs to do is spin a half-baked story (lower production costs), which is then to be taken as true until disproven? Quite seriously, why isn’t it sufficient to point out a flaw in the half-baked story (creates a new attention barrier) to put back the burden of proof? What should “Foreign Affairs” be compared to, in blogs, because that’ll determine the result? And are we repeating the BEST-LOTTERY-EVER argument (a lottery changing odds from one in a million to two in a million, it’s THE BEST LOTTERY EVER, it’s better, it’s higher, it’s more democratic …)
2) “lognormal distributions may result from linkage models that aren’t just rich-get-richer, but allow new entrants to rise to the top sometimes etc.”
Remember, the idea is not that no one ever will get into the elite no matter what – rather, it’s that there is a very small elite, and everyone else, and the elite is drawn from a certain segment of society. Many “new entrants” are part of the game of musical chairs going on – which is happening. They are think-tankers or freelance pundits who benefit from the shift, at the expense of print journalists or magazine writers. But this is not broad civic engagement, especially in terms of having any political effect if you’re not part of that chattering class already.
It’s the difference between being told that lottery tickets are now cheaper than ever, and having a good paying job.
Henry 09.27.06 at 6:24 pm
Seth – when you make a strong empirical claim that economies of attention are just as bad as standard hierarchies, yes, you are expected to make a serious case to support it. Them’s the breaks. And no – if you had actually read the article, rather than stopping part way through, you’d have seen that I do explicitly say that bloggers aren’t representative of the general public. I get the sense that you’re not so much arguing with me, as some abstracted Blog Evangelist (certainly the arguments that you’re placing in my mouth are straw man claims), and I’m not sure that there’s very much value in continuing this fight.
Seth Finkelstein 09.27.06 at 7:47 pm
Henry, “when you make a strong empirical claim that economies of attention are [a major improvement over] standard hierarchies, yes, you are expected to make a serious case to support it.”
Burden of proof is on the person making the extraordinary claim.
These are direct quotes: “Debates that used to be the preserve of a small, self-perpetuating group of pundits, pollsters, and policymakers are now being opened up to a much wider group.” … “enable individuals to take control of the means of communication for themselves and create content that is immediately available to millions.”
I cited them specifically. I’m pressing you on how true they are in specific, where’s the empirical evidence over an alternative model of “musical chairs”, and arguing they can only be supported in extremely weak senses, e.g. where “much wider group” is not a *significant* effect to the *overall* population. That it’s still basically a “small, self-perpetuating group of pundits, [etc]”.
I saw the disclaimer – In context, it was a throat-clearing to an extravagant claim:
“Nor are they a traditional form of mass populism – as currently constituted, they are a not especially representative minority of the American public (there is an over-representation of white, well-educated, middle-class men, as there is among political bloggers more generally). [throat-clearing]
What they are is an example of how the Internet can foster new ways of conducting argument and building social cooperation among diverse groups and individuals. In other words, they are the harbinger of structural changes in the relationship between technology and politics.” [Wow! It’s A New Era!]
I did read what you wrote (well, up the point where I stopped) – but I think yuou’re correct that we’ve reached an irreducible conflict.
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