PolicyByBlog

I got a chance on my DAILY SHOW appearance to mention when I first started working on my book, BLOGWARS. Here are more details--partly drawn from BLOGWARS itself. In my mind there were three points of origin of the book.

1. In 1996, a colleague and I conducted one of the first studies of presidential campaign Web sites. Our main finding was that they were mostly online "tackboards," posting information rather than developing content that exploited the hyperlinking and interactive qualities of the Internet. We stated, however, in the conclusions that: "It is currently possible, though no candidate has done this, to host an online talk show where the candidate fields questions from users throughout the nation." Then, as an afterthought, I began looking at "personal political Web sites" created not by the campaign apparatus—political consultants, managers, advisers, or parties—but by individuals who supported the candidate or some cause. Many were raucous and crude, but it did seem that personalized mass political communication was finally possible. Here were ordinary folks—dry cleaners, cops, high school juniors—grabbing a bullhorn and insisting, "Listen to me, I have something to say!" about presidential politics, terrorism, the Supreme Court, and so on. If you had Web access, you could read and interact with them for your own enrichment or bemusement.

2. In 1999, I first noticed something called a "we-blog" (pronounced wee-blog) and then a "blog." In January 1999, Jesse James Garrett (Infosift) uploaded the names and URLs of the then twenty-three known weblogs. In the spring of 1999, Peter Merholz, host of peterme.com and an Internet analyst, announced, "For What It's Worth I've decided to pronounce the word 'weblog' as wee'-blog. Or 'blog' for short." He recalled that he "enjoyed [the word's] crudeness . . . its dissonance. I like that it's roughly onomatopoeic of vomiting. These sites (mine included!) tend to be a kind of information upchucking." His readers and correspondents adopted the term.

3. Taking summer off to study pre-Caucus votes in Iowa in 2003--I was then teaching at LSU--from the vantage point of Ames, Iowa, I gauged the impact of blogs on the campaign of Howard Dean for president. (To clarify: I was researching, not working for Dean). I appreciated that something innovative and exciting was changing political communication as I knew and taught it. People were (a) bypassing regular big media, (b) creating mass communication messages without formal training (like, say, attending my journalism school), (c) reaching, in some cases, large audiences, (d) inviting others to "wiki" or coauthor accretive knowledge, and (e) producing a range of effects on contemporary public opinion, political campaigns, public affairs argumentation, and even governmental policymaking.

And so the real investigation that became BLOGWARS began…(more to come)…

I am scheduled to be on the DAILY SHOW with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central this Thursday (May 8) to talk about political blogging and my book, BLOGWARS. Everyone's first piece of advice for me about being a good guest: Don't try to be funny. I think I can manage that…

The Daily Show has become an institution of American politics very much linked to a culture where people--especially younger voters--seek out political information from non-traditional sources. [A KU student (Nathan Rodriguez) in our school's master's program is writing his thesis on the show, to some extent based on his time as an intern.] The show is part of the political culture it satirizes and, in some cases, influences it. The show is considered a source of information, an explainer of politics, and of course a "speaker" of (funny) truth to power.

TDS's effects are hard to quantify: Think in terms of Saturday Night Live's "effect" on the Clinton-Obama race! However, there is a small but growing area of research that looks at its role in politics and political socialization. A 2004 Annenberg Election Survey found that TDS viewers have "higher campaign knowledge than national news viewers and newspaper readers—even when education, party identification, following politics, watching cable news, receiving campaign information online, age, and gender are taken into consideration."

Jon Stewart was rated the fourth "most admired journalist in America" in a 2007 survey by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Another Pew study found that regular viewers of The Daily Show and its sister Colbert Report had among highest levels of knowledge about news and public affairs among any group of new consumers.

Other research is finding that the show helps explain politics to people who may not know much about politics. Think infotainment with an educational component.

Because I'm a political historian I like to find parallels between present and past. Jon Stewart in some ways is performing a very old political function--that of the court jester.

Today, we think of jesters as smart-alecks in dangling-bell hats cracking jokes at Renaissance fairs; but the post of jester at a noble household or government court was long considered a crucial one for good government. The court jester had many names throughout history, but the job profile goes back at least several thousand years. The first century CE Roman statesman, philosopher and writer Seneca tells us that in households of means there would be a slave whose special task it was to taunt and critique his masters and generally be saucy and insolent to the wealthy and powerful.

In the Middle Ages, nobles—and indeed the king himself—employed a jester, or fool. He would have an uncertain and largely uncensored place at the banquet table, in meeting rooms, and in the halls of the court. He could interrupt great counselors of state, making piquant or provoking comments, pointing out fallacies in arguments, reporting his own contrarian observations from experience outside the court, and generally speak wry truth to overstuffed power. The ideal fool is best drawn in literature by Sir Walter Scott in his medieval novel Ivanhoe: Wamba, son of Witless, is an equal opportunity infuriator to prince, baron, and banker.

The king could also trust the fool not to be a sycophantic yes-man, and it was the duty of the same to deliver bad news. There is a famous case drawn from the Hundred Years War, when England had defeated France in a great naval battle. The nobles of France were afraid to report the truth to their king, so they incited the court fool, who announced to his ruler that the English sailors were great cowards because they refused to swim in the ocean like the brave French seamen.

I realize that the role of the jesters and saucy slaves has been romanticized: They probably did not have much real power. But I have to think that their influence was also one that few political leaders wanted to admit to.

The blog is possible through the convergence of many new technologies: revolutions in human communication that were both tipping points (of ideas) and points of the tip (of new things). In parallel, more than half a millennium ago (1452-1454/55), Johann Gutenberg printed his two-volume, 1,282-page, 42-line Bible in Mainz. He produced 180 copies (150 on paper and, it is believed, 30 on parchment), using about 20 assistants in the process. His innovations included a screw press (a converted wine press) and moveable type with individual elements (periods, letters, upper- and lower-case letters).

Interestingly, the small number of Bibles hardly represented a "mass" communication, but one of Gutenberg's follow-up projects did. To raise money to pay for a crusade against Muslim Turks, the Roman Catholic Church contracted with Gutenberg to print thousands of Letters of Indulgence--certificates the Catholic faithful could buy for cash, absolving them of their sins. The practice was among the chief complaints of a young German monk named Martin Luther who, in 1517, nailed 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral, signaling the beginning of the Reformation. It is hard to imagine that such heresy could have spread so widely and so quickly in the pre-print era. In fact, Luther's theses would have become only sketchily known by world of mouth (and probably easily suppressed before they became too widespread). But in the developed printworks of Germany, the "Disputation of Doctor Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences" would become a mass document.

Unlike in China or Korea, which had invented printing earlier but were unified countries with established ruling classes, the print world of Gutenberg was the free-for-all arena of ideologies and political partisanship of 14th century Europe. Printing, therefore, became an instrument of both orthodoxy and revolution. During the religious wars of the 16th century in Central Europe, for instance, each side would prepare innumerable books that propagandized their cause and demonized the enemy. Crucially, however, it was not quite a marketplace of ideas. In areas under stable Church or government control, censorship in what people could print and what they could read was the norm. In Henry XIII's England, for example, printing a book without the king's license was punishable by death.

Many philosophers of the Enlightenment rebelled against such edicts. The principles they crafted in their writings during the period highly influenced the Founders of America and the Framers of the Constitution. "Freedom of the Press," for instance, assumes that presses will be in competition with each other as bulwarks against government abuse, ensuring freedom from monopoly by any power. One of the originators of such a concept was John Milton, the seventeenth-century English poet, who published a pamphlet in 1644 titled Areopagitia (subtitled "A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicenc'd Printing) in which he insisted that open debate freed the mind to find truth:

"Well knows he who uses to consider, that our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion. Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition."

In American history the principle of the "marketplace of ideas" became set as a value of both journalism and society. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote in a decision in a First Amendment case in 1919:

"[W]hen men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas--that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution."

By Holmes's time the mechanics of that marketplace had changed to an industrial model of the press, but the principle remains with us to this day, and blogs and those who embrace blogging as a democratic revolution in media often call the phenomenon the best incarnation of the perfect marketplace of ideas.

Not by coincidence, times of great political upheaval, and even revolution, were when the marketplace seemed at its utmost fury of competition. The great flowering of the print press in England as an expression of countervailing political ideas came during Milton's time, the troubled period in the mid-seventeenth century that saw struggles between King Charles I and the English parliament followed by several civil wars, the execution of Charles, the election of Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan faction to supremacy in England, and then the death of Cromwell and the restoration of the monarchy under Charles's son.

Newspapers at that time were known as "news books"; most of them carried the prenomen "mercurius," a reference to the Roman messenger god Mercury, today commonly drawn with a winged cap or winged feet. It was a good metaphor for these news books, titled such as "Mercurius Aulicus" (a royalist periodical); "Mercurius Britannicus" (a vehicle of the anti-royalist "Roundheads"); "Mercurius Democritus"; "Mercurius Elenticus"; "Mercurius Melancholicus"; Mercurius Politicus"; Mercurius Hibernicus" "Mercurius Pragmaticus"; and "Mercurius Rusticus." Each represented the opinion of either a particular government or faction in power or oppositional groups, religious, political, class, or otherwise. They comprised a huge literature that, while not read by every farmer and apprentice boy, was talked about or mentioned as part of the political debate of the day.

These periodicals were, of course, blog-like in that (a) they represented the opinions of diverse political factions, (b) they were the creations of a few individuals, either independently or representing factional interests, (c) while they cost some expense to publish and distribute, they were not beyond the means of individuals, and (d) they were often scathing in their attacks on political figures and others.

For example, Mercurius Impartialis blamed "the ruines both of King and people" to "the Pulpit and the Presse" and charged further that: "his Majesties Subjects [have] beene Poysoned with Principles of Heresie, Schisme, Faction, Sedition, Blasphemy, Apostacie, Rebellion, Treason, Sacriledge, Murther, Rapine, Robbery, and all" the other "enormous Crimes, and detestable Villanies, with which this Kingdome hath of later times swarmed." But the partisan Mercurian newspapers could vilify in either direction. Oliver Cromwell, the executioner of the king, complained, "My very face and nose are weekly maligned and scandalized by those scribbling mercuries."

Among the most celebrated editors of the many regularly published pamphlets put out, along with periodically published news books, was Milton himself, an adoring supporter of Cromwell and the anti-monarchist government. One of his most famous pamphlets reads like a 17th century blog-post title: "The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates: Proving that is it lawful and Hath been Held so through All Ages, for Any who Have the Power, to Call to Account a Tyrant or Wicked King, and after Due Conviction to Depose and put him to death." Milton was "posting" in reply to arguments made by the more moderate faction in Parliament (the Presbyterians) who were arguing for a retention of the monarchy and the sparing of the king's life. Milton was later appointed by the government to be "Secretary to Foreign Tongues" where--again blog-like--he ended up doing most of his work from his own home.

An important note: When Milton called for free competition of ideas--Unlicenc'd Printing--in 1644, his faction was one of many. In 1655 Lord High Protector Oliver Cromwell banned all newsbooks except one favorable to the government: there is no record that his loyal civil servant John Milton objected to such censorship!

The challenges of the marketplace model that blogs seem to embody are, thus, as follows:

a) Will people actually avail themselves of the various goods (facts, ideas, opinions) at the marketplace or just go to vendors that confirm their preexisting prejudices?

b) Will the competition of the market lead to, not healthy and vigorous debate, but permanent fissures in the body politic that, in previous eras, have resulted in civil wars?

c) Will the excesses of the marketplace of blogs invite government reaction in the forms of regulation or even censorship?

A few years ago I wrote a book on the history of the visualization of war.  Today, writing a book on blogging, I see a striking differences between two "blogs of war," that is, first person accounts of a battle in the Middle East.

Then: In c. 1300 BCE, the pharaoh Rameses II and his army fought a battle against a Hittite army at Kadesh, in what is now Syria. The battle was a draw; in fact, the Egyptians ended up retreating. But Rameses' memorial temple--an instance of massive communication--shows on its 100-foot walls pictures and hieroglyphics of the great ruler as victorious. As originally painted, Rameses is bronze skinned, broad shouldered, long armed, resolute of face, wearing the twin crowns of upper and lower Egypt, and many times larger than the Hittites and his own men--a superman in the anthropological as well as comic book sense. (Rameses became the "Ozymandias"  who, in Shelley's poem, demanded that all "look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.") In the written records accompanying the images, Rameses boasts that he personally routed "every warrior of the Hittite enemy, together with the many foreign countries which were with them."

In contrast, the pharaoh blames his own men for early problems in the battle: "You have done a cowardly deed, altogether. Not one man among you had stood up to assist me when I was fighting. . . not one among you shall talk about his service, after returning to the land of Egypt." In other words, here was the mighty-thighed Pharaoh announcing that his own men were cowards and he won the battle single-handedly. I have often wondered whether some veteran of Kadesh, walking by the tableaus, did not squint up, shake his head, gnash his teeth, and growl to his wife, "The lying bastard, it was his bad generalship/leadership that lost the day, not our cowardice." But of course we don't know; foot soldiers in Pharaoh's army didn't carve or write their campaign memoirs; and no scribe or stonemason interviewed them.

But now the dogs of war blog. Rather than expound on how blogging can put us in the action, live from ground zero, in hearts and minds of those who are there, in their own voice, let me simply reprint a recent post from the battle front in Iraq by CAPT B of "One Marine's View."

SMOKE EM IF YA GOTEM!
Friday, November 25, 2005

Another fine day here in Iraq. Thanksgiving has come and gone and we are that much closer to getting outa here. The holiday was nice although it was the same as every other day here as we maintained vigilance and on guard for attacks and concluded operations. The chow was hot chow……..It resembled turkey, really it did…..kinda….….oh well I digest. It was hot chow and I am thankful for that. As I remember back in Afghani living months on MRE’s, yes it was hot chow and Im damn glad to have it. On our Thanksgiving some of my guys were wrapping up a convoy as they would on the typical day here when they were ambushed and hit with an IED. Probably an 81mm mortar size. Because there were many civilians in the area they weren’t able to fire into the crowed where the known triggerman was hiding within. No Marines were injured due to their training, gear and armor hummers. Its was the fourth IED for us. Not a lot compared to others but about four too many, trust me one was plenty and I have the T-shirt Im good to go.

Now we race down what we call the “White Knuckle Express” It’s a road to our destination similar to others with names like ambush alley, dead mans curve and the gauntlet. I really hate this road and respect it a lot because of how dangerous it is. The second time we were scheduled to travel this route I rewrote some items in a “last letter” to my family the night before……..just in case the worse happened because this is where it would happen. I did this because the first time really got my attention if you know what I mean. We maneuver down the bare street (never a good sign) and have to jump the curb to go around an M1 Tank that is protecting our flank. M1’s are great to have around as they bring a lot of fire power to the fight. “Watch the bag on the right with wires” says truck one, as we continue our movement through the dirty trash covered streets. What doesn’t look like an IED at this point??? Everything you see looks like it could hide an artillery shell underneath it. A pack of 5 dogs begins to chase truck 2 in the street as the other trucks continue their paths. We aren’t moving or stopping for anything. In this area its survival of the meanest as these same dogs are probably some that have been seen feeding on dead enemy, a real pleasant sight.

I could explain every detail to you about it but you wouldn’t feel the sneaky eyes peeking around corners with cell phones calling trigger men ahead waiting to try to blow you up or you wouldn’t feel the weight on your chest as you swerve to miss the crater holes and the radio chatter is calling out the probable IEDs spotted. Its very surreal because while this is going on small kids are waving hello at you on the sidewalks. I guess that’s better than them mashing their thumbs down imitating the act of detonating an IED like they sometimes do. This place is crazy. As we drive Ive now counted at least twenty IED crater holes in the road and have lost count there are so many. However, this fear keeps you razor sharp and alert with adrenalin pumping in your veins to where it takes an hour or so to chill the hell out. Smoke em if ya gotem!

Just as we enter the friendly lines a large IED goes off behind us. It was triggered too late to hit us and no one was injured, well that was number five says one of the Marine, 6 if you count the one we discovered and detonated ourselves. As we pull in to our destination, prayer begins and the familiar Arabic chant is broadcasted throughout the area. You remind your Marines of where not to position themselves because of past sniper shots claiming warriors. The Marines are fired up and have lightening reflexes ready for anything. It’s a good thing because I think if “Bambi” the deer ran across them now the little thing would be vapor.

We conduct our mission on scene and adjust to do the run again. Its another fine day here in Iraq.

Semper Fi, time for a cigar!

POSTED BY CAPT B AT 9:29 AM Comments (23) | Trackback (0)

How far such communication is from the days of Rameses! I agree with the anonymous commenter who wrote CaptB that he "Felt like I was there with you Capt, through your riveting account. How did you ever learn to write like that? It is an amazing gift! We can never thank you and your Marines enough for the outstanding service and sacrifice you are providing America every day. You are all in our hearts and prayers."

The ordinary soldier can now tell his story, in his own words, even with his own pictures. And by doing so, he is changing the world of media and politics.

Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times, in one of a series of dismissals of bloggers, summed up their contribution to the information society by the following: "Bloggers recycle and chew on the news. That's not bad. But it's not enough."

If, indeed, that it was all bloggers were doing or could do, it would not be enough, but blogging today is much more than media criticism. In fact, there are bloggers who are doing everything that journalists ever did. Indeed that's the point about the world of "PolicyByBlog": blogging is a genre, a medium and a technology that can be used by professionals.

I don't think Keller was making a movie allusion. But to historians of political communication who are also interested in politicians using blogs to reach the people it is worth recalling the implications of the word "chew." I think of a potent icon of individual populist autocracy gone mad.

There were no blogs in 1956 when director Elia Kazan and writer Bud Schulberg crafted their famous meditation on the perils of democracy, "Face in the Crowd." In his best (and first) movie performance, Andy Griffith plays Lonesome Rhodes, an Arkansas yokel who, by his quick wit and ruthless character, rises to the top of the talk show radio and television game. Of course, he abuses his power, crushing people who stand in his way, and even attempts to hogtie the course of the nation.

In one famous sequence, he adopts the political fortunes of a well-known conservative senator with presidential ambitions. The man is a dignified, thoughtful, old-fashioned politician, modeled perhaps on the late Robert "Mr. Conservative" Taft of Ohio. Griffith tries to turn him into a cracker barrel populist, creating a television show in which the senator mingles with some good old boys at a country general store, chewing "tobacca" and offering political homilies.

In the movie the scene is meant to be both low comedy and high satire. The points were that (a) the pol was demeaning himself with each chaw and (b) the relatively new medium of television--which in 1956 was young as Blogs are now!--offered many opportunities for demagoguery.

Bill Keller was not thinking of Lonesome Rhodes when he portrayed bloggers as news-chewers, but the concerns about populism run amok are the same. I just think that they are misplaced: bloggers are LESS likely to be hypnotized by demagogues than audiences of the television (or the speech era), because blogging is a relatively active, questioning, process and inauthenticity by a politician is both more easy to detect and deflate.