I’ve been meaning to post this for a while but somehow didn’t quite get around to it.
Back in July director of LSE’s Polis media think-tank, Charlie Beckett, posted a great analysis of where the UK political blogosphere will go if/when Labour lose the next general election.
I won’t rehash his article, you can read it for yourselves. However,
I do want to highlight an important observation he makes that is
regularly overlooked: the influence of political ideology on political
bloggers.
Many commentators fall back on the argument that right wing bloggers
have the flexibility to attack the government while in opposition,
while left wing (predominantly Labour) bloggers have to more or less
put up or shut up as the party in government.
But Charlie rightfully suggests that the respective types of
blogging carried out by left and right wing bloggers may also be
influenced by their personal, political preferences.
Or more specifically as Charlie puts it:
“Perhaps
the individualism of blogging better suits the less collectivist
mentalities on the right.” while “the fragmentation of leftwing blogs
is very much a reflection of the divided nature of the post-Iraq,
post-Blair left.”
But then Charlie (perhaps
deliberately?) undermines this position by reflecting candidly that
maybe this cacophony of voices and opinions is “a tribute to the
variety in style and substance of what we call political bloggers.”
And that line is perhaps the key takeaway for political analysts, commentators, journalists and PROs.
Political bloggers are lumped together on party lines primarily
(although not always) by others – most often the political analysts,
commentators, journalists and PROs.
Blogging allows grassroots politicos the opportunity to become
active around an issue or series of issues that may not always fall on
party political lines. We then retrospectively interpret these as party
political as our political system is clearly delinated and doesn’t
really allow us to think beyond the Lib/Lab/Con/Green(?) silos.
Of course there are some caveats: Sites like ConservativeHome, LabourHome and Lib Dem Voice
are clearly party affiliated, but it can be agued that they are
affiliated only in name as many of their ideas differ from the official
party line.
Similarly, many political bloggers happen to be party affiliated.
But again, this doesn’t mean they always follow the party line. I would
go further and argue that joining a political party will become more
and more irrelevant for politicos (as it already has for most of the
population.
As David Wilcox has already argued:
“It
used to be that you joined associations because it was a way of meeting
like-minded people and getting help, facilities, information and other
things difficult or costly to organise for yourself. These days it is
much easier to find people and resources online.”
Moreover,
blogging allows politically motivated people to organize themselves
around particular issues that reject or cross traditional political
party boundaries.
Charlie poses the question:
“What will happen to political bloggers when the government changes?"
I
want us to consider this point another way – what will happen to
government when political bloggers change the way we (self)organize
ourselves into issue driven groups, no longer reliant on the
traditional and formal structures of membership organizations which
have been built on a model first established by thinking during the
early days of western Enlightenment more than 200 years ago.
The answer to that question says a lot about the condition of
political debate in this country. Both left and right have seen the
internet as a chance to push for power.
Technorati tags: Blogging, politics, Charlie Beckett, Enlightenment
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