Blogging Politics

Image by See-ming Lee 李思明 SML via Flickr

Would you like to know what the Office of Management and Budget and other federal agencies have been up to?  Check out the OMB Watch blog.  Want to know what the Iranian protesters are up to (and what the Administration is saying in response)? Check out Global Voices: Iran.  If you are simply interested in more general political items, you might want to turn to Talking Points Memo.  And if you want to be elected to public office (and can afford his services) you should follow Obama’s example and hire Chris Hughes, the Facebook co-founder to organize the social media aspect of your campaign.  And start a blog.

Political blogs have become intrinsic to modern politics.  The reason, perhaps has to do with the nature of politics.  According to Wikipedia, politics “is a process by which groups of people make decision. .. [P]olitics has been observed in all human group interactions…. It consists of “social relations involving authority or power” and refers to the regulation of a political unit, and to the methods and tactics used to formulate and apply policy.”  In other words, for there to be politics there must first be a community of individuals who think of themselves as peers.  But such communities rarely exist rarely in the US today.

Consider just a few telling statistics.  One in six Americans move each year; it is thought that Americans change careers five to seven times in their lifetimes—in any event, Americans change careers frequently enough that the Department of Labor “finds it impossible to define and track the changes”.  With all this moving around, perhaps it’s not surprising that just over half of marriages end in divorce.  But even if we do happen to stay in one place for any length of time, odds are we will spend a lot of our time travelling to and from work as blogger Vino S. points out.  The result, he says, is that people will “use their home merely as a dormitory in between going to work, going shopping and going on holidays.”   All this does not bode well for a sense of community, let alone a community of peers in any specific location.  There is simply too much turmoil for that.  And that is what makes blogs so important.

For as the Research Center on Computing and Society points out “Blogs can be used as tools for creating on-line communities of people interested in the same subjects – or in each other. On such a ‘blogsite,’ any number of people can describe their thoughts, activities and reactions, and thereby share them with others who participate on the blogsite with them.”  In short, blogs provide a way for people to get together—to form a community– around an issue or a candidate that does not depend on their geographic location.  And in an age of constant movement, that is vital.

And that is why, for better and worse, in the foreseeable future politics will be blogged.

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The Blogosphere and Social Media

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