Blogosphere as a Mediator

Democracy is a form of government in which power is held by people under a free electoral system.” (Wikipedia)

I believe in democracy. I believe that it is the world as it should be. In the past, creating a government that reflected all the people’s thoughts and opinions was technically impossible. However, in the case of the 2006 Connecticut Democratic Primary, it showed a new direction which moved closer to ideal democracy.

 In the 2006 Connecticut Senate race, Ned Lamont was new to most of the state Democrats, but he challenged the three-term incumbent Senator, Joe Lieberman, with less than five months to the primary. It seemed foolishly bold. What made this rather audacious attempt possible was the blogosphere sites, such as DailyKos.com, MyDD.com, as well as the local sites such as MyLeftNutmeg.com. The community of democrats that formed around those weblogs chose, and supported Lamont as the rival candidate of Liberman.

People who contributed to and followed the blogosphere sites were not united in supporting Lamont from the beginning. The initial momentum that goaded them to support Lamont was an “anti-Liberman” mentality, created by his pro-war, pro-Republican attitude. This dissatisfaction eventually led them to vet other Democratic candidates such as Lowell Weicker, and Ned Lamont. Through their discussions on the web, people finally reached the decision that the anti-war, purely Democratic Lamont was the best choice. Then they went on to the next stage of promoting Lamont, raising money, and even acquiring the legitimacy for him to run for the primary, and actually win

 

The process that they went through, especially the fund raising, used to be done only by the party. Pirch writes, “The party elite controlled the mechanism to raise money and contact the party members; any candidate who wanted to win the party’s nomination needed the blessing of the party.”  Thus, holding a grass-roots insurgent campaign often turned out to be a vain effort.

It is no longer like that.  Information technologies allow people to form a voluntary support group readily. As they showed in the Connecticut Senate race, they can select a candidate, and promote him or her through weblogs, including raising money.

This whole event reminds me of the story Clay Shirky introduced in his book, (Shirkey Clay, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organization.) In spite of a series of child abuse incidents, the only action the Catholic Church took with Father John Georghan was to transfer him from parish to parish, covering up the fact of the abuse. However, a group formed by lay membership, Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), efficiently united the “like-minded” people who had strong discontent toward the decisions of Catholic Church that were only made to cover up the incidents. Their protest movement drew world wide attention and finally made the Catholic Church retire the Father. Shirky pointed out that the key to VOTF’s success was attributed to “removing two old obstacles-locality of information, and barriers to group reaction.” Before the Internet era, lay membership who resented the child abuse incident simply had no means to communicate with other concerned church members who were scattered around the country. With the new social communication tool, VOTF successfully gathered and united those people.

In the Lamont campaign, the majority of the donations and support were coming from outside of Connecticut. Media sites such as DailyKoss, MyDD, and Youtube especially contributed to the anti- Liberman feeling by circulating the controversial video that captured the moment Liberman was kissed by President Bush, which ignited the nation’s widely developed animosity toward Liberman’s intimacy with the President and the Republican Party.  Like the VOTF, discontent toward the “ancient regime” drove them to support Lamont using grass root tool actions. Social communication tools acted as an important role in both cases.

I think that this pattern of activism using the internet and specifically, political blogs will be more common. This trend can change the conventional political organizations, especially local political parties which can be challenged by political blogospheres. I think that the blogosphere will establish its presence as a mediator, or a watch dog, between parties and its members, collecting people’s voices, criticizing authorized candidates and if necessary, backing challengers. The 2006 Connecticut primary presented a possibility of a productive relationship between the parties and blogospheres and took the political world in a new direction moving us closer to ideal democracy.

Pirch, Kevin A. Bloggoers at the Gates, Social Science Computer Review 2008 26

Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody, The Penguin Press

 

 

Bloggers at the gates

 

 

 

2006 Connecticut Democratic Primary was a significant mile stone for the election of Internet era. Ned Lamont’s defeat of incumbent Senator Joe Lieberman, who ran as the nominee of the Connecticut for Lieberman party, was accomplished by making a blogosphere consisted of people who had been developing opposition toward him. Despite the initial support of all the state’s major elected officials, Lieberman lost to Lamont in primary.

Will the Digital Divide become the Skills Divide?

 

It is certain that the digital divide is a global issue now. The gap of Internet penetration ratio between the developed world and the developing world is great, but in the long run, I believe that the problem that Andrew Chadwick called “skills divide” will be even more serious. 

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.

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