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:: Saturday, July 24, 2004 ::
Political Influence and the Power of Blogs
Daniel Drezner and Henry Ferral present to the American Political Science Association "The Power and Politics of Blogs". The abstract:
Weblogs occupy an increasingly important place in American politics. Their influence presents a puzzle: given the disparity in resource and oganisation vis-a-vis other actors, how can a collection of decentralized, non-profit, contrarian, and discordant websites excercise any influence over political and policy outputs? This paper answers that question by focusing on two important aspects of the "blogosphere"; the distribution of readers across the array of blogs, and the interactions between significant blogs and traditional media outlets. Under specific circumstances--when key weblogs focus on a new or neglected issue--blogs can socially construct an agenda or interpretive frame that acts as a focal point for mainstream media, shaping and constraining the larger political debate.
Drezner and Ferral's paper amounts to a manifesto. For those who are comfortable utilizing the world wide web for information gathering and knowledge acquisition, a three network information source with 20 minutes of agendized 'push' journalism daily is simply anachronistic. To continue to rely entirely on such a narrow band of opinion seems, frankly, incomprehensible and lazy. The other shoe is dropping on Rather, Brokaw and Jennings and it looks as if they'll be the last to know.
Good riddance.
:: Max 11:39 PM [+] ::
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