Oppositional Politics
Oppositional Politics: Activism and the Structure of the Blogosphere
The weblog community has developed an approach that distinguishes the
weblog from traditional media forms and gives it much of its strength…
That approach is based on the link… Is there an article a weblogger
agrees with? He links to it… Is there an article, an essay, or a piece of
commentary with which he disagrees? Did a politician make a speech he
feels misrepresents the facts or betrays her basic immorality? Is so, a
weblogger will tell you exactly what he thinks about it, and he will
accompany that commentary with a link… to the piece in question so that
you may simultaneously judge the words of his ideological opponent…
The link… is the single most important thing that distinguishes
weblogging from traditional forms of publishing... if you are not linking to
your primary material when you refer to it... you are not keeping a
weblog.
As of December 2004, the weblog (“blog” for short) tracking site Globe of Blogs,
which tracks and sorts almost 19,000 blogs, listed over 5,000 blogs in over 88 sub-
categories under the category of “activism”
. The categories span the ideological
spectrum: “free trade” and “sustainable development” are side by side. The blogs span
the ideological spectrum: under the “abortion” subcategory, American Liberal and Blogs
for Bush are both listed. These are blogs focusing on politically contentious topics which
traditionally activate political contention – that is, topics that activist citizens traditionally
focus on. More often than not, these are places for the dissemination of information, the
planning of strategy, and the identification of like-minded people – more efficient than
previous methods of organizing political activity, but not qualitatively different
.
A quantitative boost in the ability to disseminate information hardly seems to
merit the attention that the blogosphere – “the totality of blogs; blogs as a community;
1
Blood, Rebecca. The Weblog Handbook. (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing), 2002: 18
2
http://globeofblogs.com/?x=topic&category=14
3
Blogs do function as more efficient means of political organization, both on micro and macro levels.
Supporters of both political candidates in the 2004 election scheduled meetings (“meet-ups”) by
communicating largely through blogs (much of Howard Dean’s Democratic primary campaign was
organized in this way). Political parties, under new campaign finance rules, relied on sympathetic blogs to
funnel money through decentralized fund-raising. However, these kinds of uses for blogs is again just the
channeling of traditional political activity in more efficient ways. They are not unique forms of activity.
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