"Push-Button Publishing for the People": The Blogosphere and the Public Sphere
culturecat.net
by Clancy Ratliff
quotes:
In 1999, at least two free-of-charge blogging tools were released: Pitas and Blogger, whose slogan is “push-button publishing for the people.” These tools, which are easy to use for those who know how to send and receive email and navigate Web pages, enabled millions of users to create their own weblogs, but, as Andrew Ó Baoill (2004) has pointed out, several barriers to access exist, including the technological literacy required, the access to computers and the internet, and, perhaps most important, the leisure time.
Even if everyone could keep weblogs, not everyone would have an opportunity to be heard, which becomes problematic if one attempts to compare discussions on weblogs to argumentation resulting in rational-critical consensus, which is the goal of discourse in the public sphere.As McCarthy (1984) has claimed, in order for a genuine consensus to be reached, the exchange must meet the conditions of what Habermas calls the “ideal speech situation” (p. 306). That is, the resulting agreement must be “such that any rational, competent judge would come to the same conclusion” because the strongest argument would prevail (McCarthy, 1984, p. 307). In order to reach such an agreement, everyone in the discussion must have an equal opportunity to speak and express themselves, and to use any speech act, including constatives (validity claims about reality such as “That is an oak tree”), regulatives (claims relating to social norms such as “Your comment was condescending”), and avowals (claims regarding the speaker's subjective view such as “You make me laugh”); in addition, everyone must have equal power in the discussion (Foss, Foss, & Trapp, 2002, p. 246-248). In the realm of weblog discourse, also called the “blogosphere,” everyone in the discussion has an equal opportunity to speak, but not everyone has an equal opportunity to be heard or to have equal power over the exchange. This is evident in what has been called the “A-List” phenomenon in blogging: The more people link to a particular weblog, the higher it rises in search engines and in ranking programs such as Technorati1 and the Ecosystem2. Thus, since the weblog gets more exposure, more people have an opportunity to find the weblog and link to it themselves. Bloggers who are just starting weblogs have an especially difficult time being read amidst the large pool of texts. Clay Shirky (2003) writes: “It's not impossible to launch a good new blog and become widely read, but it's harder than it was last year, and it will be harder still next year.” This is because new weblogs are being started every day, and as long as the most widely-read bloggers keep writing posts that are consistent with the quality and perspective their readers expect and enjoy, they will probably continue to have the most readers.
To be sure, having many readers is not necessarily desirable in the public sphere. Blogger A.K.M. Adam (2004) observes that “the more a site attracts attention, the more nearly it resembles broadcasting rather than conversation.” Trish Roberts-Miller (2004) notes a paradox “between inclusion and argumentation. The more people included in any public (or counterpublic) sphere, the less the discourse can be rational-critical.” Weblogs, especially widely-read ones, have been called “one-to-many” communication, without the kind of sustained deliberation one should find in the public sphere. Ó Baoill (2004) points out that the reverse-chronological order and brief, rapid-fire comments create a privileging of novelty over critical, careful, well-thought-out reflection: "The importance placed by many weblogs on breaking news not only leads to greater risks of faulty information being published but, given the layout of weblogs, can foreshorten debates. The use of separate comment threads on each individual weblog post means that each particular thread can be quite short, being supplanted by the newest news item."
Roberts-Miller (2004) sees like-minded weblog clusters as enclaves rather than counterpublics; she had anticipated “a more open and public public sphere of participatory argumentation rather than simply expression,” but “was instead dismayed to see a realm, not of counterpublics, but of enclaves, and of a system that, at its worst, facilitated the hardening of ideology, and, at its best, allowed for an expressive public sphere.” |
