Sunday, June 11, 2006
British Blogging Has a Long Way to Go...
THIS article in today's, Observer shows how far the British blogosphere has to go before it can emulate our cousins across the Atlantic. It describes the first bloggers convention held last week in Las Vegas. It attracted a huge audience including Presidential hopefuls and all the key political media. Wow.
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We have a few years before the next General Election (probably), by then we may be where the US is as a nation. Some of my american friends reckon the "Downing Street Memo" was when the blogosphere really came into it's olwn in the US
when do you think you'll make 20 million hits a month? Pretty impressive isn't it!
No reason why we can't do the same.
This event also caught my eye and I wrote about it six days ago.
http://elleeseymour.blogspot.com/2006/06/rise-of-political-blogging.html
I suspect British political blogging is close to having the same sort of impact (if not readership) as the U.S.
But the two scenes are - electorally - quite different. Over here the election fever lasts not much more than a month, in the U.S. it's pretty much already started in anticipation of 2008.
Also, the "issues" in the U.S. are much more divisive (considering how many of them have religious backgrounds). It's much easier to get wound up by abortion and gay marriage (which will probably never be big election issues here) than education and the NHS.
My brief flirtation with U.S. political blogging suggests it's more interested in elections than the run-of-the-mill stuff that occupies the majority of political news in the UK, and this might lead to it being ultimately more influential.
If an opposition takes itself seriously it should oppose day in, day out, not just for the four weeks of a general election.
As bloggers it is our duty to highlight the daily incompetence of the crooks and spivs of Labour, and, if needs be, to highlight the failings of our own side when they speak out of turn or miss an opportunity to stick the boot in.
It's worth noting that Kos and his followers represent the extreme left of the Democratic party, and that the more influence they gain within it the further they will drag it away from mainstream opinion. If they prove as influential as they think they are - a highly debatable point - they will be as big an electoral liability to the Democrats as the hard left were to Labour in the 1980s.
I think Chris Doidge is right about the effect of the different electoral cycles in the US and UK, and the different way in which the American parties nominate their candidates is also important. Any politician who hopes to be the party's presidential candidate, or who is an ally of someone who does, has to be out schmoozing the activists well in advance of the primaries.
Thirdly, the British blogosphere may just be having a different kind of influence than its US counterpart. It has been most important in providing an outlet for strands of opinion that aren't well represented in the media, such as libertarians and left-wing supporters of the liberation of Iraq. As such, it acts as a kind of distributed think-tank - a "think-net" if you will - for unconventional ideas.
On the left, look at how blogging has lead to the Euston Manifesto, and a serious intellectual challenge to the glib assumptions of the liberal establishment. On the right, look at how blogs are making the case for ideas like the flat tax system and spreading awareness of BBC bias (and why it matters).
Finally, the amount of readers and comments that major British blogs attract - including newspaper efforts like the Guardian's commentisfree section - suggest that the low turnout in recent elections is due to disillusionment with how the parties operate rather than a lack of public interest in the issues. I believe that one of the major factors in this is the extent to which politics is now conducted through the mass media. When so much of what any politician says is "spin" aimed at manipulating the next day's headlines, the public comes to distrust anything they say. It also sends the message that politicians are not actually talking to the public any more, only to the media. Politics begins to look like a game played between MPs and journalists from which the public is excluded.
Blogs provide an opportunity for concerned citizens to argue the issues, without the spin and hackery. They promote the re-engagement of the public with politics, and promote direct communication between the public and their representatives.
I think the right wing bloggers will provide more coal in the fire of the large movement of the Right that is really starting to build now.
It apparently attracted "around 1000" bloggers. Compare the US population to the UK, and that's the equivalent to perhaps a 100-blogger convetion here. Not so different. The reasons the politicos are there is that the Democrats desperately need anything to giove them more activists, and they think the armchair far-left fruitbats of Kos could be useful.
After organising the Our Social World blogging conference last year (www.oursocialworld.com) were we had a somewhat disappointing turnout of about 60 people even though we had some big name bloggers speaking. Maybe I should organise a political blogging event this year.
I think it would also help if there was a little more diversity in the UK broadcast MSM.
There is no Fox tv channel over here, so the leftie media in the UK feels much less need to respond to the work of the blogosphere.
It's not, strictly speaking, the first overall bloggers' convention but the Daily Kos convention, 99.% leftist wackos.
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