When America was forming, when the media was still delivered by horse and the printed word was a relatively new enterprise in our fledgling country, the place to get your news was the tavern. “ Despite the efforts of the clergy it was the tavern that made possible the widest dissemination of information. … Tavern owners subscribed to foreign and, later, domestic newspapers and posted them for customers to read. Patrons not only brought in news but carried away intelligence to share with others.” (Sloan, Media in America p.37) I realize it is a somewhat romantic notion to imagine our founding fathers in spirited debate with a pint in hand, but it may not be far from the truth. Taverns offered a unique opportunity for public discourse at a time when information was valuable, and new ideas were necessary. In 2004, taverns are no longer the forerunner in terms of current events, and the generic pate of the daily newspaper gives readers little to discuss over their lattes. Add to that a public that is infatuated by the glitterati of the entertainment media, the draconian state of our communications laws, the inherent self restraint of a citizen in a country that is at war, and the even more confusing self restraint expected by our P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act and what do you get? You get a recipe for a disaster in a self-governed democracy.
It has been said that a democracy cannot exist if the people in it are not informed. I agree. I believe in the marketplace theory, and in a homogenized media climate like the one we have experienced for the last twenty to thirty years the marketplace of ideas tends to narrow. Again, I see this as a serious detriment to our working democracy. Since Lippman and the start of the opinion leaders, the citizens of our country have slowly backed away from digesting the news, and instead have conformed to the two-step flow, whether it is Rush Limbaugh’s talking points, or Farenhiet 9/11, the public has decided to think in the most convienient way possible. And why not? It is difficult to work a forty hour week and still think about the news, and most people want to spend their time away from work with their families or interests. Capitalism is a time consuming ordeal that leaves one but precious moments to enjoy what one works so hard for. But, so is democracy.
In order to become better informed on the world outside the U.S. media this spring, I began to use the computer to check BBC and the Telegraph. It was refreshing to hear outside opinions of our country, if not a little guilt ridden, and I was starting to see the giant information gap that our country had fallen into. After watching Jaques Chirac and Tony Blair speak in front of European college students, unscripted, I found a website called Congress.org which promised to deliver letters to chosen leaders, and I sent president Bush a letter asking him to hold a debate with Kerry and Nader in a similar fashion to the Chirac/Blair debate. I believed, more than anything, that my generation was going to need some sort of understanding of what we were going to be inheriting when our time came to run things. Not to my surprise, I received no reply, and in fact, my letter was never published on the website. Which came as a relief to me. But I did find Congress.org a very interesting website, as it allowed non-partisan and sometimes extremely offensive posts to be made by Americans all over the country. In their letters to leaders section, many voices rang out to be heard. After my experience I thought perhaps the website was run by the C.I.A., who else would let people rant like that and threaten the president if not the people who were assigned to look for that specifically? Congress.org is like looking at flyers on a wall, there is no active discussion, only single letters, but still it offered the opinions of regular Americans and sometimes those opinions were very interesting.
In search of actual discussion, I found my way to Air America Radio, and the weblogs for each of their radio shows. Air America is the celebrity liberal radio channel, and it is there where I found a home and similar thinkers at the Majority Report weblog.
The difference between a weblog or blog and a website is that websites usually direct you to information and you do not interact with other guests. A weblog is a real time discussion board if there are enough people present to keep up a conversation. At MRR, the conversation was politics, 24/7 and the conversation hardly ceased. It was here that I began to see the tremendous possibilities of the weblog as a cyber-tavern, a place where information can be exchanged and discussed, and no matter how heated the argument got, the worst punishment would be a 24 hour ban from the blog. My left wing leanings earned me a place at the table, and I spent quite a bit of time this election season engaging in spirited debate and becoming better educated about American policy. I’d like to think.
There is a new lingo that one has to learn in order to understand the culture of blogging, and an important definition is that of a troll. In blogspeak, a troll is someone who posts offensive or distracting information onto a blog with the intentions of, essentially, getting attention. At the MRR weblog, our trolls also went by another name, freepers. The majority of those labeled trolls on MRR were Bush supporters, and a lot of them tended to post their own opinions at Freerepublic.com, a website for a conservative magazine. Once I made the connection, I visited their website to try to keep an eye on them. What I found was that, with some differences, both had rudimentary organizational skills, and both were instigating their populaces to arms. While the MRR hosts had set up a meeting place for it’s members during the R.N.C., Free Republic members had organized and participated in Florida Kerry protests, and had the pictures to prove it. The non-partisan part of my brain jumped for joy, Americans were becoming involved again in their democracy.
At this point I think it would be wise of me to point out that I do not think that weblogs had any sort of significant impact on this election, although other web based efforts like Moveon.org, Get out the Vote, and the Dean campaign certainly did. If, at any point weblogs did have an impact, it was during Rather-gate, when the folks at Free Republic debunked the Killian memos. I’m not sure that the impact will ever be felt in a measurable way in terms of turnout or support, but the impact is intended for the individual who wants to avoid the mainstream press and focus on issues relevant to their political beliefs as opposed to accepting the traditional narrow worldview. “ An Audience is passive, a public is participatory, we need a definition of media that is public in it’s orientation.” Greg Ruggerio says in Douglas Rushkoffs “ Media Violence”, and I think that blogging is the type of media that is public in it’s orientation.
To take a more critical view of these examples, we can put them into frameworks, and explore the subtle differences in each form. Congress.org, to start, is a very patriotically themed website. There is a flag, a picture of President Bush, a snap of the Capital, and the colors are red white and blue. As it is non-partisan, the function seems to be to inform more than to persuade, although the citizens that post are certainly attempting persuasion. Since there are so many different opinions with out any discussion, I doubt persuasion is possible. Another downfall is that since there is no discussion, there is a lot of false or unsubstantiated material that has no source. In an internet argument, the linking of sources is traditionally the only way anyone will believe a story. And even then, the source can be considered biased, imagine answering an article from fox news or newsmax with one from liberaloasis or Mother Jones. Stale mate. But congress.org does have the same feel as Washington Journal on c-span, my favorite shows before I quit stealing cable, and often the letters are simply rants or praises for the president. Congress.org, though, is run by a company called Capitol Advantage and the feature which allows you to post a message that people can respond to costs money. So does having your letter hand delivered to a representative of your choice. I am not going to say that this is a ulterior motive, because I think they offer unique services, but at the same time they are trying to sell the public the right to address their representatives, and this disqualifies it from a public forum. I suppose though, taverns in the 1600’s probably had two drink minimums for political arguments.
The Free Republic website is also patriotic, blue and red fonted characters on a white background, but it is less accessible in terms of discussion than either of the other examples. Instead of having one open topic of debate, each of the daily Conservative headlines gets it’s own discussion board, presumably to keep the people focused on the specific choices of information the website’s chiefs had handpicked. I believe this would be considered agenda setting. The contents run the gamut from terrorism to liberal bashing, with some of the regular characters routinely promoting and almost idolizing our president and our troops. When an Iraqi prisoner/insurgent was shot point blank by an American and it was captured on film a few weeks ago, a clever freeper posted “ I would have turned around and shot the cameraman.” All in all it is a very pro-conservative, and there seems to be little attempt at persuasion. One of the most disappointing factors in the website, though, is that you must apply for a registration and get approval before you can join in the discussion. Once in, any combative remark or dissenting opinion will get you banned from the discussion boards. While I am sure that this policy was begun for a reason, it stands to moot the possibility of the marketplace theory. And, if we consider Ruggerio’s assertion that the public would be well served by a media that was public in it’s orientation, Free Republic’s followers have still allowed themselves to be the audience to the sites daily agenda setting, and can only comment from the sidelines.
Not surprisingly to me, I found the liberal weblog to be the most like what Ruggerio describes. Majority Report is a show that is hosted by two well known activists, Janeane Garafalo and Sam Seder and therefore there has a large participation base for the weblog. The style of the website is different from the others in that it has red, white, blue, and pink, the pink being perhaps a universal sign of acceptance for a certain type of people that have recently been ignored and marginalized, the lesbian and gay community. At the top there are pictures of the hosts, and along the sides there are links to other leftwing sites like Dailykos and liberaloasis. At the top of each thread (page) of the weblog, there are links to stories that Sam has deemed important, but within the page, comments are free form, and usually take on a conversational nature. Since it is an open page, all the people there are in one “room” essentially, unlike Free Republic, where if there are fifteen different stories there are fifteen different “rooms”. Another feature that is somewhat rare is the ability for anyone to post, there is no registration. Because of that, there is a significant amount of liberal baiting by conservatives who might happen to drop in, ranging from the standard “ Four More Years!” to things best left unwritten in a college paper if you get my drift.
(And, when this got to be a problem in the early summer, we held a vote to decide if we wanted to stop the hostile aggravators by forcing them to register and kicking them off the site if they got too offensive. We chose to let them stay, and only ban the ones who imitated our personalities when we were not there. That, it was decided, is the lowest trick of all. That ruling stood until the day after the elections, when the marketplace was temporarily suspended for a good bout of consolation. I am proud to say that by the fifth, the marketplace had reopened and we were weathering abuse yet again.)
But interruptions aside, the format of information dissemination on this weblog, and probably many others out there, consists of both discussion between groups of people who like to talk, and sporadic interruptions by newshounds who find the newest stories on the web and post them so that the others can intigrate the new information into their discussions. Since I have been involved in this, I have found myself constantly ahead of the newspapers when it comes to international and federal level news. I believe at one point, embarrassingly enough it is in my journal, I saw a headline about the capturing of Nick Berg’s killers on the BBC, then heard nothing more for three days when suddenly the story was atop every website imaginable. I convinced myself that I had witnessed a cover up of some sort. I was probably jumping the gun, but it was the first time I conceptualized the control over the media the government had, and it upset me.
Another interesting characteristic of the weblog is that not only do Americans post there, but people from Japan, Isreal, Australia,London pop in and out of the conversation, offering a more worldly opinion to our discussions, and bringing us information and resources. Probably because of the hosts, or the guests but the addition of this perspective adds much to the marketplace. Also, there is the fact that the weblog is read on the air, and we are allowed to pose query’s to people like Chomsky, Vidal, Goodman (Amy), even Sean Hannity. This interactivity among communication mediums fascinates me, and I feel it represents the concept of media being public in orientation the best.
There a thousands upon thousands of weblogs in existence all over the world. The phenomenon was start, legend has it, in 2000, and soon after the first sites were up, thousands joined in. So many so, that in the year 2000 one web-jockey named Graham Freeman set up a system with which you could test your weblog to see if it was worthy of existence. “ It has been unilaterally decided that there are too many weblogs for the collective attention.” He stated in an interview with the New York Times writer, David Gallagher. And to some extent he was right. Weblogs serve as discussion boards for the more popular ones, and diary type journals for the less popular. Since they are easy to create and easy to read, many television and newspapers have begun them in the interest of gaining readers input into what makes the news. Most people tend to use them to comment instead of engage in conversation. But, thanks to this simple idea, it is now possible for us to leave a message for Kieth Olberman at MSNBC, as well as countless other news organizations, simply by navigating to their site and typing.
How, you may be asking, does this all relate to politics? As I stated before, and well have the backing of Justice Holmes and Mieklejohn, information and the availability to it is imperative if our democracy is going to work the way it was intended to. The internet is a difficult place to separate fact from fiction, but once you know where the reputable sources are, you have successfully circumvented the mainstream media, and are off to fill your brain with the knowledge you are seeking. In the spin zone climate of a presidential election, knowledge in debate is power, and more and more Americans are becoming interested in knowing what their tax dollars are being used for. This rebirth of awareness will be greatly facilitated by the internet and weblog community, where not only was I able to find the answers I needed, but also was informed of the Steve Kurtz case and the plight of the Critical Arts Ensemble as well as the Roy/Goodman speaking lecture this past summer. Were in not for other people at MRR pointing these things out to me, I probably would have missed them completely.
The internet is also an entity that is still being formed. While it can speed up the dissemination of information, it can also frighten and become a platform for those wishing to strike terror. This long summer’s rash of cruel tortures captured on video and broadcast over the internet makes one wonder if they would have happened at all if it were not so easily to disseminate. In Japan, there has been a rash of internet organized suicide parties, and it is beginning to look like there might be more censorship and restrictions place upon it soon. These are difficult questions, because now it is no longer up to an editor to make the call and take the blame in regards to graphic or frightening footage, it is up to whomever is uploading.
But this is still to come. Currently, the internet and weblogs still enjoy a freedom of speech that I have never experienced. I remember this summer, showing a friend of mine Jib-Jab.com and him looking incredulously at me asking, “ We can do that?” These are the people who need to take advantage of what the web has to offer. Politics can be excruciatingly polarizing, and when one is given the keys to their own castle of knowledge, if I may be so melodramatic, there is definitely a catharsis that occurs for the better.
(now after last class, feel like a heel, trying to tie this together without regurgitating Dr Niman’s final thoughts.)
In searching for a media outlet that best suits my needs as a citizen, I came across many, many different sites that attracted my attention, but these three held my interest the most throughout the campaign. They each represented to me different voices I felt like I needed to be aware of in order to understand how the public’s true sentiment. While I did not agree with the philosophy of Free Republic, I was able to find out what they were up to at the touch of a button. This site was effective in creating a reason, good or bad, for me to return. Now there is a large victory party planned in Washington for the freepers, and I hope they eat and laugh and believe that they are the winners, just as I’ll be marching outside declaring the president a fraud and charlatan.
Congress.org captured my interest and attention and still does. The idea of people writing to their leaders and truly believing in them to answer their hopes or fears is an almost ancient art in our democracy, I am glad to see it’s resurgence on such a public scale. The fact that free speech is rarely restrained here fills me with some small hope that P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act two and it’s effects on our beloved internet will not be as dramatic as I had once predicted.
There is an argument to be made in regards to the internet and the ability we as media consumers are beginning to realize, that would state implicitly that self chosen media in the control of the observer would destroy the fundamental principles of the marketplace, that the culture would shrink in our country as more people retreated to their sanctuaries of thought. Imagine someone who is given the ability to watch whatever they want to on television for the rest of their days, do you think they would engage themselves in something they might find boring? To such critics, I reiterate that television and the internet are fundamentally different in that one is a passive act while the other is active, and that in any forum of free discussion, where ideas may at least let themselves out for a quick wander, would prove to be more stimulating and diverse.
MRR became my home on the internet, and fostered a new spirit of interest in the news for me. Also, I was persuaded into moving my vote from Nader to Kerry, not only because of the pressure from the blog, but also because the information that I had familiarized myself with seemed to point toward a bleak future with Bush. Here we are though, bleak future locked and loaded, and I know the only way I can help make a difference in the next election is by continuing this attempt to stay informed and to engage in heated political debates when the time arises and the knives are drawn. Having the ability to discuss issues with people across the globe, and joke around as well, has proven to be the most interesting and fulfilling relationships I have encountered in political discourse. The addition of the constant threat of neo-conservative trolls and homeland security officers ( really ) has only made our arguments as a whole collectively stronger. This is what I had imagined a free marketplace of ideas would be, a place where ideas are provoked and revoked with equal grace and dissent. While John/John may have lost the election, I hope that the outcome of the 04 presidential race will eventually prove to be my generation taking a more decisive role in infoming themselves as citizens and not simply consumers. I truly think that in the information age, these cyber taverns will ring with the only close representation to a free marketplace of ideas in the world.
It has been said that a democracy cannot exist if the people in it are not informed. I agree. I believe in the marketplace theory, and in a homogenized media climate like the one we have experienced for the last twenty to thirty years the marketplace of ideas tends to narrow. Again, I see this as a serious detriment to our working democracy. Since Lippman and the start of the opinion leaders, the citizens of our country have slowly backed away from digesting the news, and instead have conformed to the two-step flow, whether it is Rush Limbaugh’s talking points, or Farenhiet 9/11, the public has decided to think in the most convienient way possible. And why not? It is difficult to work a forty hour week and still think about the news, and most people want to spend their time away from work with their families or interests. Capitalism is a time consuming ordeal that leaves one but precious moments to enjoy what one works so hard for. But, so is democracy.
In order to become better informed on the world outside the U.S. media this spring, I began to use the computer to check BBC and the Telegraph. It was refreshing to hear outside opinions of our country, if not a little guilt ridden, and I was starting to see the giant information gap that our country had fallen into. After watching Jaques Chirac and Tony Blair speak in front of European college students, unscripted, I found a website called Congress.org which promised to deliver letters to chosen leaders, and I sent president Bush a letter asking him to hold a debate with Kerry and Nader in a similar fashion to the Chirac/Blair debate. I believed, more than anything, that my generation was going to need some sort of understanding of what we were going to be inheriting when our time came to run things. Not to my surprise, I received no reply, and in fact, my letter was never published on the website. Which came as a relief to me. But I did find Congress.org a very interesting website, as it allowed non-partisan and sometimes extremely offensive posts to be made by Americans all over the country. In their letters to leaders section, many voices rang out to be heard. After my experience I thought perhaps the website was run by the C.I.A., who else would let people rant like that and threaten the president if not the people who were assigned to look for that specifically? Congress.org is like looking at flyers on a wall, there is no active discussion, only single letters, but still it offered the opinions of regular Americans and sometimes those opinions were very interesting.
In search of actual discussion, I found my way to Air America Radio, and the weblogs for each of their radio shows. Air America is the celebrity liberal radio channel, and it is there where I found a home and similar thinkers at the Majority Report weblog.
The difference between a weblog or blog and a website is that websites usually direct you to information and you do not interact with other guests. A weblog is a real time discussion board if there are enough people present to keep up a conversation. At MRR, the conversation was politics, 24/7 and the conversation hardly ceased. It was here that I began to see the tremendous possibilities of the weblog as a cyber-tavern, a place where information can be exchanged and discussed, and no matter how heated the argument got, the worst punishment would be a 24 hour ban from the blog. My left wing leanings earned me a place at the table, and I spent quite a bit of time this election season engaging in spirited debate and becoming better educated about American policy. I’d like to think.
There is a new lingo that one has to learn in order to understand the culture of blogging, and an important definition is that of a troll. In blogspeak, a troll is someone who posts offensive or distracting information onto a blog with the intentions of, essentially, getting attention. At the MRR weblog, our trolls also went by another name, freepers. The majority of those labeled trolls on MRR were Bush supporters, and a lot of them tended to post their own opinions at Freerepublic.com, a website for a conservative magazine. Once I made the connection, I visited their website to try to keep an eye on them. What I found was that, with some differences, both had rudimentary organizational skills, and both were instigating their populaces to arms. While the MRR hosts had set up a meeting place for it’s members during the R.N.C., Free Republic members had organized and participated in Florida Kerry protests, and had the pictures to prove it. The non-partisan part of my brain jumped for joy, Americans were becoming involved again in their democracy.
At this point I think it would be wise of me to point out that I do not think that weblogs had any sort of significant impact on this election, although other web based efforts like Moveon.org, Get out the Vote, and the Dean campaign certainly did. If, at any point weblogs did have an impact, it was during Rather-gate, when the folks at Free Republic debunked the Killian memos. I’m not sure that the impact will ever be felt in a measurable way in terms of turnout or support, but the impact is intended for the individual who wants to avoid the mainstream press and focus on issues relevant to their political beliefs as opposed to accepting the traditional narrow worldview. “ An Audience is passive, a public is participatory, we need a definition of media that is public in it’s orientation.” Greg Ruggerio says in Douglas Rushkoffs “ Media Violence”, and I think that blogging is the type of media that is public in it’s orientation.
To take a more critical view of these examples, we can put them into frameworks, and explore the subtle differences in each form. Congress.org, to start, is a very patriotically themed website. There is a flag, a picture of President Bush, a snap of the Capital, and the colors are red white and blue. As it is non-partisan, the function seems to be to inform more than to persuade, although the citizens that post are certainly attempting persuasion. Since there are so many different opinions with out any discussion, I doubt persuasion is possible. Another downfall is that since there is no discussion, there is a lot of false or unsubstantiated material that has no source. In an internet argument, the linking of sources is traditionally the only way anyone will believe a story. And even then, the source can be considered biased, imagine answering an article from fox news or newsmax with one from liberaloasis or Mother Jones. Stale mate. But congress.org does have the same feel as Washington Journal on c-span, my favorite shows before I quit stealing cable, and often the letters are simply rants or praises for the president. Congress.org, though, is run by a company called Capitol Advantage and the feature which allows you to post a message that people can respond to costs money. So does having your letter hand delivered to a representative of your choice. I am not going to say that this is a ulterior motive, because I think they offer unique services, but at the same time they are trying to sell the public the right to address their representatives, and this disqualifies it from a public forum. I suppose though, taverns in the 1600’s probably had two drink minimums for political arguments.
The Free Republic website is also patriotic, blue and red fonted characters on a white background, but it is less accessible in terms of discussion than either of the other examples. Instead of having one open topic of debate, each of the daily Conservative headlines gets it’s own discussion board, presumably to keep the people focused on the specific choices of information the website’s chiefs had handpicked. I believe this would be considered agenda setting. The contents run the gamut from terrorism to liberal bashing, with some of the regular characters routinely promoting and almost idolizing our president and our troops. When an Iraqi prisoner/insurgent was shot point blank by an American and it was captured on film a few weeks ago, a clever freeper posted “ I would have turned around and shot the cameraman.” All in all it is a very pro-conservative, and there seems to be little attempt at persuasion. One of the most disappointing factors in the website, though, is that you must apply for a registration and get approval before you can join in the discussion. Once in, any combative remark or dissenting opinion will get you banned from the discussion boards. While I am sure that this policy was begun for a reason, it stands to moot the possibility of the marketplace theory. And, if we consider Ruggerio’s assertion that the public would be well served by a media that was public in it’s orientation, Free Republic’s followers have still allowed themselves to be the audience to the sites daily agenda setting, and can only comment from the sidelines.
Not surprisingly to me, I found the liberal weblog to be the most like what Ruggerio describes. Majority Report is a show that is hosted by two well known activists, Janeane Garafalo and Sam Seder and therefore there has a large participation base for the weblog. The style of the website is different from the others in that it has red, white, blue, and pink, the pink being perhaps a universal sign of acceptance for a certain type of people that have recently been ignored and marginalized, the lesbian and gay community. At the top there are pictures of the hosts, and along the sides there are links to other leftwing sites like Dailykos and liberaloasis. At the top of each thread (page) of the weblog, there are links to stories that Sam has deemed important, but within the page, comments are free form, and usually take on a conversational nature. Since it is an open page, all the people there are in one “room” essentially, unlike Free Republic, where if there are fifteen different stories there are fifteen different “rooms”. Another feature that is somewhat rare is the ability for anyone to post, there is no registration. Because of that, there is a significant amount of liberal baiting by conservatives who might happen to drop in, ranging from the standard “ Four More Years!” to things best left unwritten in a college paper if you get my drift.
(And, when this got to be a problem in the early summer, we held a vote to decide if we wanted to stop the hostile aggravators by forcing them to register and kicking them off the site if they got too offensive. We chose to let them stay, and only ban the ones who imitated our personalities when we were not there. That, it was decided, is the lowest trick of all. That ruling stood until the day after the elections, when the marketplace was temporarily suspended for a good bout of consolation. I am proud to say that by the fifth, the marketplace had reopened and we were weathering abuse yet again.)
But interruptions aside, the format of information dissemination on this weblog, and probably many others out there, consists of both discussion between groups of people who like to talk, and sporadic interruptions by newshounds who find the newest stories on the web and post them so that the others can intigrate the new information into their discussions. Since I have been involved in this, I have found myself constantly ahead of the newspapers when it comes to international and federal level news. I believe at one point, embarrassingly enough it is in my journal, I saw a headline about the capturing of Nick Berg’s killers on the BBC, then heard nothing more for three days when suddenly the story was atop every website imaginable. I convinced myself that I had witnessed a cover up of some sort. I was probably jumping the gun, but it was the first time I conceptualized the control over the media the government had, and it upset me.
Another interesting characteristic of the weblog is that not only do Americans post there, but people from Japan, Isreal, Australia,London pop in and out of the conversation, offering a more worldly opinion to our discussions, and bringing us information and resources. Probably because of the hosts, or the guests but the addition of this perspective adds much to the marketplace. Also, there is the fact that the weblog is read on the air, and we are allowed to pose query’s to people like Chomsky, Vidal, Goodman (Amy), even Sean Hannity. This interactivity among communication mediums fascinates me, and I feel it represents the concept of media being public in orientation the best.
There a thousands upon thousands of weblogs in existence all over the world. The phenomenon was start, legend has it, in 2000, and soon after the first sites were up, thousands joined in. So many so, that in the year 2000 one web-jockey named Graham Freeman set up a system with which you could test your weblog to see if it was worthy of existence. “ It has been unilaterally decided that there are too many weblogs for the collective attention.” He stated in an interview with the New York Times writer, David Gallagher. And to some extent he was right. Weblogs serve as discussion boards for the more popular ones, and diary type journals for the less popular. Since they are easy to create and easy to read, many television and newspapers have begun them in the interest of gaining readers input into what makes the news. Most people tend to use them to comment instead of engage in conversation. But, thanks to this simple idea, it is now possible for us to leave a message for Kieth Olberman at MSNBC, as well as countless other news organizations, simply by navigating to their site and typing.
How, you may be asking, does this all relate to politics? As I stated before, and well have the backing of Justice Holmes and Mieklejohn, information and the availability to it is imperative if our democracy is going to work the way it was intended to. The internet is a difficult place to separate fact from fiction, but once you know where the reputable sources are, you have successfully circumvented the mainstream media, and are off to fill your brain with the knowledge you are seeking. In the spin zone climate of a presidential election, knowledge in debate is power, and more and more Americans are becoming interested in knowing what their tax dollars are being used for. This rebirth of awareness will be greatly facilitated by the internet and weblog community, where not only was I able to find the answers I needed, but also was informed of the Steve Kurtz case and the plight of the Critical Arts Ensemble as well as the Roy/Goodman speaking lecture this past summer. Were in not for other people at MRR pointing these things out to me, I probably would have missed them completely.
The internet is also an entity that is still being formed. While it can speed up the dissemination of information, it can also frighten and become a platform for those wishing to strike terror. This long summer’s rash of cruel tortures captured on video and broadcast over the internet makes one wonder if they would have happened at all if it were not so easily to disseminate. In Japan, there has been a rash of internet organized suicide parties, and it is beginning to look like there might be more censorship and restrictions place upon it soon. These are difficult questions, because now it is no longer up to an editor to make the call and take the blame in regards to graphic or frightening footage, it is up to whomever is uploading.
But this is still to come. Currently, the internet and weblogs still enjoy a freedom of speech that I have never experienced. I remember this summer, showing a friend of mine Jib-Jab.com and him looking incredulously at me asking, “ We can do that?” These are the people who need to take advantage of what the web has to offer. Politics can be excruciatingly polarizing, and when one is given the keys to their own castle of knowledge, if I may be so melodramatic, there is definitely a catharsis that occurs for the better.
(now after last class, feel like a heel, trying to tie this together without regurgitating Dr Niman’s final thoughts.)
In searching for a media outlet that best suits my needs as a citizen, I came across many, many different sites that attracted my attention, but these three held my interest the most throughout the campaign. They each represented to me different voices I felt like I needed to be aware of in order to understand how the public’s true sentiment. While I did not agree with the philosophy of Free Republic, I was able to find out what they were up to at the touch of a button. This site was effective in creating a reason, good or bad, for me to return. Now there is a large victory party planned in Washington for the freepers, and I hope they eat and laugh and believe that they are the winners, just as I’ll be marching outside declaring the president a fraud and charlatan.
Congress.org captured my interest and attention and still does. The idea of people writing to their leaders and truly believing in them to answer their hopes or fears is an almost ancient art in our democracy, I am glad to see it’s resurgence on such a public scale. The fact that free speech is rarely restrained here fills me with some small hope that P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act two and it’s effects on our beloved internet will not be as dramatic as I had once predicted.
There is an argument to be made in regards to the internet and the ability we as media consumers are beginning to realize, that would state implicitly that self chosen media in the control of the observer would destroy the fundamental principles of the marketplace, that the culture would shrink in our country as more people retreated to their sanctuaries of thought. Imagine someone who is given the ability to watch whatever they want to on television for the rest of their days, do you think they would engage themselves in something they might find boring? To such critics, I reiterate that television and the internet are fundamentally different in that one is a passive act while the other is active, and that in any forum of free discussion, where ideas may at least let themselves out for a quick wander, would prove to be more stimulating and diverse.
MRR became my home on the internet, and fostered a new spirit of interest in the news for me. Also, I was persuaded into moving my vote from Nader to Kerry, not only because of the pressure from the blog, but also because the information that I had familiarized myself with seemed to point toward a bleak future with Bush. Here we are though, bleak future locked and loaded, and I know the only way I can help make a difference in the next election is by continuing this attempt to stay informed and to engage in heated political debates when the time arises and the knives are drawn. Having the ability to discuss issues with people across the globe, and joke around as well, has proven to be the most interesting and fulfilling relationships I have encountered in political discourse. The addition of the constant threat of neo-conservative trolls and homeland security officers ( really ) has only made our arguments as a whole collectively stronger. This is what I had imagined a free marketplace of ideas would be, a place where ideas are provoked and revoked with equal grace and dissent. While John/John may have lost the election, I hope that the outcome of the 04 presidential race will eventually prove to be my generation taking a more decisive role in infoming themselves as citizens and not simply consumers. I truly think that in the information age, these cyber taverns will ring with the only close representation to a free marketplace of ideas in the world.
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