David Sklar reports on the Digital Democracy Teach-In at ETech yesterday. This tidbit describes the fallacy of "blogging for democracy":
[T]his session showed me that although I had thought that the idea of people who blog alot coming together to tell each other how cool blogging is was a thing of the past, it isn't. Are there sessions at bookselling conferences where people get together and talk about how it's neat that you can read information in books?Blogging, social software, whatever. It's all a wash in this year's race for the Presidency. To date there have been precisely two innovations of import in election strategy: shoving all of the primaries to the beginning of the year (crowning John Kerry as the nominee in the winter, not the late spring), and avoiding federal matching funds (thus allowing unlimited campaign spending for the general election).To be fair, this is the *Emerging* technology conference, so some amount of jibber-jabber (to borrow a phrase from Mr. T) is expected, welcome, and even perhaps productive, but I'm a curmudgeon when it comes to "Up With Blogging" navel-gazing.
[...] That's what this session about blogging seemed like to me. Everyone was obsessing over blogging qua blogging without talking about what kind of information makes a good political blog or a bad political blog, etc. There was one question about what distinguishes a political blog from any other kind of blog and the answer was ... nothing! "Mr. Knopf, what distinguishes the ink in detective thrillers compared to the ink in literary fiction?" Who cares? I want to know what makes a good detective thriller! The medium ain't the message here, not at this rate.
Once this becomes a two-man horse race, it's a whole new contest. Maybe then blogging will be important. At this rate, that possibility seems highly unlikely.
