Blogging

I was on the “Odyssey”:http://www.wbez.org/programs/odyssey/odyssey_v2.asp show on Chicago NPR yesterday, debating blogs with Eugene Volokh, and got a question that floored me in the opening minutes of the discussion (audio link “here”:http://www.wbez.org/DWP_XML/od/2005_06/od_20050609_1200_5031/episode_5031.ram). I was asked by the radio host what we knew about bloggers – and responded that there were a lot of them, and that while we didn’t know much about the profile of bloggers in general, we did know that the “big” political bloggers tend to be overwhelmingly male, white and well educated. She then asked me how I knew that these bloggers were white, and I floundered for some seconds before saying that many had pictures up on the WWW. This wasn’t really a satisfactory answer, as many don’t have pictures, and even those that do might in theory be putting fake pictures up for the hell of it. Probably the more accurate answer is that I infer it from the way that Technorati 100 bloggers overwhelmingly tend to discuss the kinds of things that white well educated guys with mildly-to-very geeky interests in technology, pop culture and science fiction like to talk about. At a later point in the interview, we were both asked whether this was a problem. Eugene thought not so much – there’s a lot of political diversity among well educated males. I disagreed – there are some real issues with, say, the way that politics is defined. Certain issues get discussed to death; others are systematically overlooked. If a different crew of people had been there at the outset of the blogosphere, and able to take advantage of the massive network effects/path dependence, the blogosphere could have been a very different place indeed. On the one hand, the blogosphere does seem to me to have made a real contribution to diversity in the media as a whole. Some voices that tend systematically to get shut out, say, from the op-ed pages of the major dailies, play a real role. The left is a lot stronger and diverse in the blogosphere than it is in the mainstream media. But that doesn’t mean that we should think that the blogosphere itself is a level playing field for all forms of opinion; it isn’t.

My floundering aside, I should note that Gretchen Helfrich who hosts Odyssey, did far better at asking interesting and searching questions about the blogosphere than anyone else who has interviewed me on the topic before (or who I’ve heard interviewing other people). That’s in part a function of the hour long format, which allows for more expansive discussion, but only in part.

I’ve updated the “academic blogroll”:https://crookedtimber.org/academic-blogs/, for the first time in a couple of months – there are many additions. My apologies to all those who have been waiting to be added – a combination of other responsibilities, and the fact that changing the blogroll is a little more painful in our new WordPress incarnation than in MT have led to me keeping on putting off the evil day of updating it. That, and the fact that it’s increasingly becoming impossible for one person to keep up with every new academic blog out there. If I’ve inadvertently left someone out, or if there’s someone else I ought to add, please let me know in comments or by email.

While blogosphere triumphalism is one of my least favorite forms of triumphalism, this is pretty neat. Harper’s Magazine wrote a story about Colorado Springs’ large evangelical New Life Church. Colorado Springs blogger Non Prophet wrote about the article, and attracted the attention of both Jeff Sharlet, the author of the article, and Rob Brendle, associate pastor at the Church. Non Prophet ended up interviewing both; he asked Brendle what errors he thought Sharlet had made, then let Sharlet answer those criticisms. It’s an interesting exchange, and one that just wouldn’t have happened a few years ago.

“Orin Kerr says”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_06_05-2005_06_11.shtml#1118179393

bq. someone needs to come up with a name for discussions about the blogosphere’s gender/political/racial breakdown. These sorts of questions seem to pop up pretty frequently, and always lead to lots of discussion. Ideas, anyone?

Er, I guess if pushed I “could think of a word”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology. (Maybe this is a VC thing: I remember a while back one of the other conspirators came up with the phrase “Reverse Tinkerbell Effect” to describe self-defeating prophecies or self-undermining beliefs, a phenomenon he seemed to think no-one else had ever noticed.) If you wanted to get legalistic about it (this is the VC, etc) then you might say the request was for a name for the _discussions_ of the blogosphere’s sociology rather than the thing itself. But that would just be the amateur or folk sociology of the blogosphere. This might itself be the subject of study if, for instance, you were interested in explaining the typically depressing structure of discussions about women in blogging, or what have you. Alternatively, maybe Orin is looking for some well-established Usenet folk-concept like “flame war.”

I am very, very sorry that it took me so long to pull this together. Many thanks to Anthony at Things You Don’t Talk About in Polite Company for the name, and many thanks to those who emailed. Newish bloggers, I’m going to do this again in two or three weeks, and I’d love to hear from you about your best posts. Opinions expressed are not necessarily mine.

Mark Thoma at Economist’s View has a terrific basic-principles primer about The Need for Social Insurance.

Charles Norman Todd at Freiheit und Wissen compares the Bush administration’s treatment of two different Latin American governments in Guatemala and Venezuela: Two Models for U.S. Diplomacy. He also edits the Carnival of the Un-Capitalists:

Our Carnival is not meant to be anti-capitalist. Rather, we are just trying to gather the best economic posts from the left on issues ranging from globalization and neoliberalism, to income disparity, free-trade, corporate malfeasance, etc, and so on.

Patrick Smith at Tiberius and Gaius Speaking… is likely to get some angry comments about Is the Republican Party truly fascist?

Wufnik at Bazzfazz is an American ex-pat in the London. He’s got an interesting post on Team Horowitz’s take on European anti-Americanism:
American xenophobia.

Delicious Pundit has a nice metaphor going on in The martini of public policy.

Nick at News From Beyond The North Wind writes about Cumbrian company towns in These Preterite Shoes.

Chase McInerney at Cutting to the Chase is a freelance journalist in Oklahoma; he writes In Defense of Newsweek.

Josh Marshall’s new venture, “TPM Cafe”:http://www.tpmcafe.com/ is up and running, as you probably know. It’s a cross between a group blog and something like the Daily Kos model of a community website. Best of luck to them, and hopefully once they find their groove they will lay off the “Pull up a chair” stuff.

This weekend I’ll be at the annual meetings of the International Communication Association meetings in New York. All of the members from my research group will be participating in the conference and we’ll be reporting on several of our projects. Sunday midday we will present a poster summarizing some preliminary findings from our project on cross-ideological conversations among bloggers. I thought I would give a little preview here.

Cass Sunstein in his book Republic.com talks about the potential for IT to fragment citizens’ political discussions into isolated conversations. Borrowing from Negroponte, he discusses the potential for people to construct a “Daily Me” of news readings that excludes opposing perspectives. Sunstein argues that for democracy to flourish, it is important that people continue to have conversations with those in disagreement with their positions. However, he is concerned that with the help of filtering out unwanted content people will fragment into enclaves and won’t be exposed to opinions that challenge their positions. The book is an interesting read, but it does not offer any systematic empirical evidence of the claims.

I have been working on a project this past year with Jason Gallo and Sean Zehnder on empirically testing Sunstein’s thesis. We are doing so by analyzing cross-linkages among liberal and political blogs. You may recall that about two months ago Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance came out with a report on “The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election”. My first reaction was one of panic. Here we had been working on our project for months and someone else came out with the results first. However, a closer read made me realize that our project has some unique elements. And if nothing else, seeing that project has made us more careful and critical in our work showing that more research in an area can be fruitful, because hopefully it inspires the agenda to move forward in a productive manner.

[I updated this image on June 1 when I realized the right graph wasn’t displaying exactly what I had described it as.]

Our work has focused on addressing two questions. First, we are interested in seeing the extent to which liberal and conservative bloggers interlink. Second, we want to see what kind of changes we may be able to observe over time. Sunstein’s thesis suggests that we would see very little if any cross-linking among liberal and conservative blogs and the cross-linking would diminish over time. We go about answering these questions using multiple methodologies. We counted links and calculated some measures to see how insular the conversations are within groups of blogs. We also did a content analysis of some of the posts in our sample. We continue to work on this project so these are just preliminary findings.
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Via “Brian Leiter”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/05/are_moral_philo_2.html I see that the very smart “Kieran Setiya”:http://ideasofimperfection.blogspot.com/ now has a blog. Kieran is a moral philosopher at the “University of Pittsburgh”:http://www.pitt.edu/~kis23/. We were in graduate school at Princeton at the same time, where each of us was known as “the other Kieran” to different portions of our semi-overlapping social network. At least, I’ve always assumed _both_ of us were designated as such at various times –maybe I just routinely came in second.

I didn’t write this post.

Eric Muller “reports”:http://www.isthatlegal.org/archive/2005/05/nine_months_lat.html that Peter Irons and Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga have “extracted a retraction and apology”:http://michellemalkin.com/archives/002489.htm from Michelle Malkin, after she smeared them in her book and on her blog last year. At least in some of its parts, the self-correcting blogosphere still needs the threat of legal action to kick it into gear.

“Savage Minds”:http://savageminds.org/ is an elegantly-designed new blog run by six anthropologists. Its roster includes Alex Golub, whose site I used to read more often in the days before blogs, and who once “wrote a post”:http://alex.golub.name/log/?p=28 containing the following story:

bq. Met with my advisor the other day to go over a conference paper I gave him that would eventually be turned into a chapter. He said that it was ‘better than ok’, which is the most positive comment I’ve ever gotten from him. Much better than when I was writing my MA, when he’d give me back drafts with comments like “don’t ever give anything of this quality to me again ever”.

I sometimes relate this anecdote to graduate students in order to preempt any passive-aggressive whining about my comments on their work being insufficiently kind and appreciative.

Brad DeLong revisits the Guenter Grass question.

bq. UPDATE: Well, the original title is wrong: Guenter Grass is not minimizing the holocaust by comparing Nazi Germany to globalization. And I should not call him crypto-Nazi scum.

bq. But there is, still, something very wrong with claiming not that the neoliberal approach to economic reform is wrong, and that the analyses of people like me and my friends are flawed, but that we and I are the standard-bearers of a new totalitarianism. There is something very wrong with claiming that that the decision of the Social Democratic Party to push Harz IV is not a mistake, but rather a reflection of the Social Democratic Party’s subservience to multinational capital.

bq. Chancellor Schroeder is working for the interests of the German people as he sees them, and deserves a better quality of critic.

There aren’t many (any?) political bloggers who haven’t made overly-hasty or sweeping judgments at one point or another. But there’s a lot more rhetoric out there about the “self-correcting blogosphere” than there are selves who are willing to correct where correction is appropriate. More power to Brad for doing this.

This really ought to enter the standard brief against PowerLine, along with “Jimmy Carter is a traitor!”, “That Schiavo memo is a forgery!”, “How dare the New York Times reveal the sexual orientation of openly gay activists!” and “When the left begins beating its wife, it will be an outrage!”

For some unknown reason my browser ended up pointed at “Right Reason”:http://rightreason.ektopos.com/ earlier, and I saw “a post by Dan Bonevac on Ann Coulter”:http://rightreason.ektopos.com/archives/001478.html. Well, I thought to myself, if there are going to be any sensible conservatives in blogtropolis, Bonevac, who is a pretty fine philosopher, should be among them. If someone is going to be able to show what is valuable in contemporary conservatism by distinguishing it from what Ann Coulter does, it should be him. Sadly, that wasn’t to be.

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