Is political blogosphere really productive?

I have chosen “The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog” written by Guy J. Golan and Stephen A. Banning in American Behavioral Scientist as the article for my discussion.

2004 was the first Presidential election where bloggers played very significant role. Howard Dean was the first presidential candidate who utilized blogs effectively, by letting his supporter’s blogs unite and successfully made a blogosphere for his campaign. Back then, although only 9 % of Internet users declared themselves as “frequent readers” of political weblogs, their influence was becoming stronger. People from the mainstream media noticed the value of news offered by some extraordinary bloggers and started to put them under constant observation.

The research for this article was conducted a couple of months before the 2004 election. The purpose of this research was to identify and evaluate the structure of a political blogosphere, to be more specific, to study the patterns and the result of linking of those political blogs.

At first, Golan and Banning chose 40 of the top notch political blogs, 20 from liberal blogs and the other 20 from conservative blogs. Golan and Banning also studied a large network of almost 1000 political blogs for a representative view of the liberal and conservative blogs. They constructed a citation network by identifying whether a URL present on the page of one blog referenced another political blog.

 

The results are below.

・91% of the links in both liberal and conservative blogs stayed within the community. The links between liberal blogs and conservative blogs were rare.

・84% of conservative blogs linked to at least one other blog. 82% received a link.

・74% of Liberal blogs linked to another blog.

・Conservative blogs averaged  15.1 links. while liberal blogs averaged  13.6.links

  It should be noted that this difference is because the higher proportion of liberal blogs had no links at all.

 

What this result suggests is that conservative bloggers are more united, appreciating interactions in the community, while liberal bloggers tends to be more independent.

They also conducted a close research from August 24, 2004 to November 15, 2004. In this period, a total of 22,884 posts were made on the top 40 blogs.

12,470 were on the left leaning blogs.

10,414 were on the conservative blogs.

The researchers compared the citation behavior in those posts, by counting the number of posts in which each blog cited another blog.

 

The results are below.

・Liberal bloggers cited one another 1511 times

・Conservative bloggers cited one another 2110 times.

  Cross citing – only 15%

 

・Liberals cited conservatives 247 times.

・Conservatives cited liberals 312 times.

 Notable fact: Total number of posts for conservatives was 16% fewer than liberals, and they made 40% more links.

 

The Figures below describe the links that were made between the top 40 liberal and conservative blogs.

The left one is the connection between the conservative and the liberal network that has 278 links within their network. The middle one is the connection of blogs where at least 5 citations were linked.

The right one is the connection of the blogs where at least 25 citations were linked, where there was almost no interaction between liberal and conservative.

 

The researchers concluded “In our study we witnessed a divided blogosphere, liberals and conservatives linking primarily within their separate communities, with far fewer cross-links exchanged between them.”

 

The question is – Is political blogosphere really  productive?

 

To select 40 blogs used in this research, the researcher interviewed editors, reporters and publishers to name the top 3 blogs they were constantly checking. Interestingly, their choices consistently overlapped. 10 of the most popular political blogs appeared on their top 3 lists repeatedly. That means that the world of political blogs is disproportionately dominated by a small number of blogs.  Power law theory can be applied to the blog world.

 

My guess is that a huge number of insignificant blogs that make up the tail of this graph are making subsets with the few famous, distinguished blogs at the core. Then those small subsets form medium sized subsets by linking and citing each other. Finally, entire political communities, both liberal and conservative are formed and create a huge bipolar shape.

 

The problem is, there are only a few interactions between both sides. Aside from a few exceptions, most political blogs seems to be tracking back contents with the same point of view as the bloggers, or citing articles from newspapers that favor the bloggers political orientation just to support them. Or they cite the opposite opinions and then criticize them. In both case, this only emphasize “the echo chamber effect’, and there is no space for productive discussion.  

The term “media echo chamber” can refer to any situation in which information, ideas or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission inside an “enclosed” space. Observers of journalism in the mass media describe an echo chamber effect in media discourse. One purveyor of information will make a claim, which many like-minded people then repeat, overhear, and repeat again (often in an exaggerated or otherwise distorted form) until most people assume that some extreme variation of the story is true. (Wikipedia)

 

In the conventional media, such as the TV news and newspapers, we have many chances to be exposed to a variety of opinions. But when it comes to blogs, people are less likely to check blogs that are opposed to their opinion. They tend to join the people who share the same attitudes and philosophy. At least I can say that about myself. The echo chamber effect simply puts more distance between both sides of thought. Overall, as far as politics goes, blogospheres inhibit active discussion on both sides.

 

Those facts leave no doubt that the political blogosphere, as well as some social network services such as MySpace and Face book, clearly are polarized into liberal and conservative factions, and there is almost no interaction with each other. Also, we can be fairly certain that the so called “echo chamber effect’ is occurring on both sides which leads to the polarization and to a vicious circle.

 

That said, echo the chamber effect can be a great engine for supporting and advocating political candidates. From Howard Dean to Barack Obama, we have witnessed its reinforcing power for unified cooperation

 

In conclusion, it is possible to build a couple of hypothesis.

1, Political blogospheres, as well as some SNS, have a great power for advocacy for political activities due to the echo chamber effect.

2, However, it includes the tendency to aggravate polarization and inhibits the occasion for direct, active discussion between liberals and conservatives.

 

Overall, although today’s cyber communication technologies expedite our communication ability drastically, they have also caused fractionated that harms the totality of the society.