The Civic Virtues of Blogging

So I started reading "Republic.Com" by Cass Sunstien (who incidentally co-wrote the text on Constitutional Law I studied in law school). In the first 15 pages, I have found a way to disagree with virtually every aspect of his viewpoint (a reaction he would applaud for somehow proving his point). In the first place, I'm not sure how he's going to fashion an entire book out of this topic. The introductory chapter seems to have exhausted every amplification of what I see as the stuff of dinner conversations. More importantly perhaps, I reacted immediately to his singular point that auto-filtering and specialization of media will diminish our capacity to participate in democracy. He further concludes that if we do not participate in democracy in a certain essential manner, we may lose the very freedoms that enabled us to filter and narrow media in the first place.

En Guarde Monsieur Sunstien (I’m sure he is quaking):

1. The majority of people reading internet news does not personalize or heavily filter their news because it’s too much trouble. Most people spend a lot of time aimlessly drifting in the web universe, picking up tidbits here and there, but mostly losing the information. It’s as if the subway lets us off at the Sargasso Sea every morning.

Television is a different story perhaps. With the advent of every specialized channel imaginable and TiVO (all available for a king’s ransom), I suppose people could end up watching only one channel or absorbing one kind of material. I’m not sure about the viewer statistics on television but I generally watch a channel I’ve selected from the guide because that channel has something interesting. There’s no real filtering here, only selection from a large set options presented constantly. But when you get down to it, the pickings are real slim. I cannot imagine any single channel broadcasting stimulating and entertaining material for an intelligent person for more than a few hours at a time (if that).

2. Broadcast TV sucks now and has always sucked. The major broadcasters like CBS, FOX, and NBC, are forced to appeal to the alleged tastes of the nation. First of all, even if there was such a thing as “national taste,” broadcasters choose their material based on what will satisfy their advertisers, who have an image to maintain that does not necessarily reflect even the average aesthetic. Also, attempting to fit shows into a mode that will offend no-one but grab the attention of everyone makes for a simplistic and almost totalitarian programming regime. If viewers are switching from NBC to HBO and Showtime, it’s because many of us cannot tolerate the pandering to so-called family values – the inane plots, superficial themes, and depressingly sunny dispositions. We are particularly unenthusiastic about broadcast news. When local news and even CNN is not busying itself with reportage on a curing gingivitis and trendy diets or talking up rising violent crime statistics, they’re doing human interest stories and stirring the pot with reports of terrorism and child abductions.

If newspapers no longer sell like hotcakes all over America, television, not the internet, is the perpetrator. You can’t beat televised information with a stick – it’s a powerful, manipulative, and even coercive drug. The internet has nothing on TV; TV rules us with an iron fist. Television manufactures consent in a way that no amount of filtering can.

So in fact, these “general intermediaries” (Sunstien’s term for general interest publications and broadcast channels) will be our undoing if they continue on the tack they have initiated. In a savage hunt for “share” and ensuing rise in ad revenue, these intermediaries churn out the same meaningless dribble day after day to cater to the lowest common denominator. Broadcasters create in the mind of their viewers a monolithic sense of events and opinion. These general intermediaries choose what we will know, feel, and eventually, how we will vote. This is the heart and soul of a functioning democracy?

3. Filtering does not diminish but rather enhances the robust nature of our democracy (well about as robust as it can be with only 30% of citizens voting on any given elections). Weblogs in particular allow people to actively participate in publication of their own perspectives on recent information. What a weblogger finds interesting, he shares with others – talk about connection! Imagine a world in which we all have time to blog with vigor.

Proactive even creative interaction with information not only encourages bloggers to seek out challenging and intriguing headlines but invites bloggers to find more and better sources. Consider this scenario: when you first start blogging, you may notice that you’ve selected all front page items from the New York Times. This leads you to conclude is not a value-add to the community, because after all, the New York Times has already posted a front page and it probably looks better than yours does. So you go and find other, perhaps alternative media sources, like Salon.com, and happen upon news aggregators, like newsisfree.com, that blow your mind with all the different publications available. Now, in order to attract more visitors to your site, you provide bits from all over the place with thoughtful, insightful (you think) commentary. Now we have a little newspaper that has not only one voice (yours) or the voices of the reporters/editors of the New York Times, but potentially hundreds of diverse voices.

4. Blogging and bulletin boards enables users to reach out to one another bi-directionally. Mass media on the other hand is a one-way communication where a small, elite group of individuals perform the filtering for an enormous pool of recipients, who passively absorb (and generally either regurgitate or pass without notice). Weblogging is “Here’s the New York Times and my opinion about the New York Times” and in a network of blogs perhaps, a response from another blogger, “And here’s mine.” Media is not discursive; people create discussions. As the internet is a highly interactive and dynamic media, I see no better way to build a thriving democracy.

The Times, Washington Post, and even CBS news online should be grateful to bloggers. I probably only read The Times once a week before its online edition, and even online I only scanned the headlines. Now to build a more interesting weblog, I scour The Times, Salon, The Nation, and news aggregators for articles that piquq my interest. This phenomenal revolution for me occurred when I need to create a specialized newsfeed for a client site too. I found that as I sought out news on a particular topic, in that case non-profits, I was coming across a large and varied set of sources and events. I also found myself reading many articles and thinking critically about them because I needed to select certain items for the log. My act of filtering expanded, not shrank, my knowledge boundaries.

The Internet and general intermediaries can work together infinitely well. Before weblogs and RSS, these media monoliths decided what I needed to hear and how I would hear it. Now these intermediaries serve me and allow me to critically act on their information. I am BLOGGER – hear me roar!