PolicyByBlog

I got into trouble with some bloggers a while ago when I wrote a column for EDITOR & PUBLISHER (online, August 4, 2005) that was unfortunately titled "Will Blogs Go Bust?"

One of the many superior qualities of blogging to writing, say, a book(!), is that you have a simple way to revise, extend or retract your remarks on any subject. Let me do so now. I felt and still do there is much hyping about the numbers of blogs and the powers of blogs. Not that a heck of a lot of people are not blogging, or that I wrote a book about political blogs precisely because I felt that bloggers were growing in popularity, prominence and power.

But...When we look at actual surveys of bloggers we find that they may be high in number but they tend to come from the higher-education and upper-income portions of the population, which is as true in Kyrgyzstan or Nigeria as it is in the United States. In the U.S., bloggers are overwhelmingly white, and a majority are male. Similarly, a report on Americans' use of technology issued by Forrester Research in summer 2005 found the country almost evenly divided between "tech optimists" (those who eagerly seek out technology to facilitate their lives and solve perceived problems) and "tech pessimists" (those who are skeptical about new technologies and find them less relevant to their daily lives). [1] Tech optimists tend to be younger, higher-income, are much more likely to use the Internet, and spend almost double the hours of tech pessimists online. Strikingly, 78 percent of tech optimists reported reading blogs regularly, while only 6 percent of tech pessimists reported being regular blog users. Basically, some people are too poor or too busy to blog or do not see the benefits to doing so.

So most peasants don't blog. Not yet, anyway. One basic reason is that political blogging tends to occur among people who either are public intellectuals or who want to be public intellectuals, which of course does not usually include subsistence farmers and welfare mothers. Blogging, like all technological trends and innovations, is much more likely to be adopted by more highly educated, more socio-economically privileged people, which in America today still generally means white (and perhaps Asian) middle-class folks. One analogy would be to call blogs a new tech such as the CD in which we expect the demographically enhanced part of the population to adopt early.

Such a lopsided demographic (and psychographic) has many implications. Among them is one factor most of us male, white, middle-class bloggers don't tend to think about. Keith Jenkins, an African-American editor at The Washington Post who also blogs, stated, "It has taken 'mainstream media' a very long time to get to [the] point of inclusion....My fear is that the overwhelmingly white and male American blogosphere... will return us to a day where the dialogue about issues was a predominantly white-only one."

His point is an intriguing one. During the writing of this book, civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks died. It was she who, by her refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama on December 1, 1955 helped pioneer the modern civil rights movement. We should remember that Ms. Parks did not achieve vindication and the right to sit at any open seat on a bus through democratic means or by the will of the people. No one on the bus that day argued in her cause. If there had been a referendum in Montgomery the next week, the majority of participants (most of the whites and perhaps not a few blacks wishing to avoid "racial troubles") would have voted against the integration of buses. (The other black passengers did move to the "Colored" section of the bus when the bus driver told them to; Parks alone remained seated.) Practically all the achievements of the civil rights movement were installed by courts over the objections of the majority of local communities.

But, of course, it is not a case of blacks or other minorities being segregated actively and purposefully from blogging--I think. As Tiffany B. Brown of the blogs blackfeminism.org and tiffanybbrown.com explained in an e-interview with me, "If you haven't participated in the blogosphere, you don't understand its worth. You have to think blogging is important." Her conservative counterpart, La Shawn Barber, with her own eponymous Web site, suggested to me that, "While technical knowledge isn't necessary to blog, writing skills play a big role. Improve education through traditional methods of teaching (and not more money), I think we'll see more blacks using computers more often, and the number of black bloggers will increase." If so, blogging will better live up to its mantle of universal popularity.

So bloggers are not a scientific probability sample of the American (or world) public; nor did anyone vote for them to hold the power of being our Tribunes.

But...even if blogs are not vox populi it does not follow that, as blog critics love to taunt, bloggers are the fringe-dwellers, tinfoil-hatters, anti-fluorides and loony Star Trek fans of American political life. To the contrary, while bloggers may not be the people, there is growing evidence that they have an extraordinary and extra-proportional effect on the people--and politics, campaigns and elections, public affairs, policy making, press agendas and coverage, and public opinion. Vocal minorities, we should recall, have in political history changed the world and affected the fate of millions. In revolutions sheer numbers are not the main guarantor of success or failure. A few thousand Bolsheviks were able to seize Russia in 1917, whereas millions of protestors could not move the Chinese government in 1989. In the case of the former Soviet Republic of Kyrgyzstan in 2005, only a few hundred demonstrators actually took over the government building and sent the president packing.

In democracies, too, a few politically effective people can make a mighty impact. Obviously, political leaders can change our world by building wide support or by making fateful decisions. But almost a century of communication research suggests that the kind of people who blog could very well be players in politics, either as part of campaigns or in opposition to them. Communications researchers, starting in the 1950s, described a "two-step flow" of persuasion. The goal of persuasion campaigns, from "I like Ike" to "Drink a glass of orange juice with breakfast," was not to persuade everyone directly but to persuade local opinion leaders within a community who would then persuade those who respected their opinion or followed their leadership on political matters.

The modern term for such folks is influentials, people who probably have some influence, positive and negative, on the decision-making of larger groups: pastors, politicians, journalists, even professors. They were described by Ed Keller and John Berry as "canaries in the mineshaft for looming political ideas....If word of mouth is like a radio signal broadcast over the country, influentials are the strategically placed transmitters that amplify the signal, multiplying the number of people who hear it." (See also this essay and this study)

According to one study, "Americans who are politically active via the Internet are almost seven times more likely than the average American to serve as opinion leaders among friends, relatives and colleagues." [2] The Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, in a study published in February 2004, profiled what it called "Online Political Citizens (OPCs)": These turned out to be disproportionately male, higher income, and higher education than the average American. One later study of bloggers reported that 70 percent fit the enticing category of "influential." (See also this piece).

Bloggers are particularly attractive as being categorized as influentials because they seemingly have a built-in constituency. As one political blogger put it, "I have 3,000 people who listen to what I say and, judging from posted comments, many of them pretty much agree with me." Political scientist Austin Ranney noted, "The people who regularly vote in presidential primaries are more interested in politics in general. Also, they are people with better formed and more elaborate political philosophies." And they don't just think about politics or post on it. According to a Pew study, fully 99 percent of Dean online partisans voted in the November presidential election. Stay-at-home-slackers or sore losers they were not.

Another factor is that blogging is more popular among young people than older folks. Our youth are oriented toward using the Web as their primary means of creative self-expression: A November 2, 2005 study by the Pew Institute found that more than half of online American teenagers have created Web sites, and about a quarter of Internet-using 12-17 year-olds have blogs or personal online journals or have created some sort of online content. Indeed, a possible moniker for the entire cohort of today's 18-25 year-olds is the "Myspace" generation--but will they blog politics as well as sex, music and movies? Stay tuned.

As for political bloggers, can they influence their readers or greater public opinion? Bloggers can offer arguments, but at the end of the day they have no financial, moral, social, or cultural leverage to force their audience to engage in any particular political behavior. That Hugh Hewitt or "Kos" or Michelle Malkin, however, might call upon their readers to write an angry e-mail to Senator X may very well create a surge in traffic to the poor legislator's Web site.

Can bloggers, however, get out the vote? We know that the Internet can be a tool of political motivation. The blogswarms can call attention to controversies and gaffes, as in the case of Rathergate and Trent Lott's praise of Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond. The Web can also be important in fundraising and voter mobilization--as many candidates from John McCain in 2000 to Howard Dean in 2004 proved. As well, we have a few examples to which we can point and allege, "This political campaign was (partly) won or lost because of a blog." It seems inconceivable that the future will not provide further such cases, although I suspect that blogs will uncover or magnify a candidate's misstep rather than cause others to march out to vote in a physical swarm.

In sum, bloggers are many things, some contradictory, but one quality they all possess is the potential for political power. Exploring how this power came about and how it has been actualized is the task of my book, BLOGWARS.

[1] T. Schadler and C.S. Golvin, "The State of Consumers and Technology: Benchmark." Forrester's Consumer Technographics, July 29, 2005.

[2] E. Schwartz, "Don't write off blogs yet," InfoWorld.com, April 11, 2005, p. 10.