Matthew Scott Hindman provides a wonderful synapsis on the ideologies and presumptions on the effects of blogs within the 21th century generation, specifically within the political realm of the United States. There are many points that he addresses, which I agree with, questioned myself and perhaps, wished he would go more into emphasis.
During the three chapters, I felt that Hindman didn’t really have a voice himself. In each chapter he discusses what the book is about, what this volume will cover, what he wants his audience to gain from his readings; but I don’t have a sense of his own opinion (just the opinions of the sources he quotes).
Still, I believe Hindman illuminates important aspects of the blogosphere. These points are, but not limited to:
1. 1. Are blogs raising political awareness and openness with citizens?
2. 2. Do blogs possess a democratic backdrop?
3. 3. Are blogs truly democratic?
4. 4. How important are blogs amongst the political realm?
5. 5. Who the top bloggers are, their background.
6. 6. The people who are actually being heard?
7. 7. The notion of blogs actually increasing the openness to spread citizens’ voices.
In theory, for both one and four, I believe that blogs are important in politics because they are another medium in which this type of news can spread. A medium, once used, will remain online forever (the pleasure and joys of writing online). Blogs have helped many people resign and gain popularity/fame within both the political and/ore world market.
Examples could be shown when Hindman discusses “Rathergate” and after bloggers announced their evidence of the new Bush documents to be fake, “Dan Rather announced his resignation as the CBS news anchor a few months later”. Another example is delivered when the author briefs his readers on the top ten bloggers and mentions, “where these now-very-public individuals would be without their blogs…Drum would likely still be working as a software consultant; Johnson would be just another Los Angeles-based Web designer”. Blogging, in politics, is important and has become a dominant portion of our media.
In reference to points two, three, and five, I believe that blogs are not completely democratic. I like how Hindman defines what certain terms, such as democracy, means in this topic. For me, blogs can be created by anyone with a computer, a form of democracy, but the actual blogs that get the highest views are still part of “the elite” group. My definition of elite stems from the author’s mentioning, “they are educational white male professionals”. The top ten bloggers, as shown, are all Caucasian, except for one being half.
This is not the only issue, as regarded in the book “the pattern of links that lead to a site also largely determines its rank in search engine results…not all choices are equal. Some sites consistently rise to the top of Yahoo!’s and Google’s search results; some sites never get indexed by search engines at all”. How is this democratic? If democracy is determined by the amount of links, references and popularity of one’s page, I think the overall definition has been changed.
I believe that Hindman makes a great point by acknowledging that there is a “…difference between speaking and being heard”. Points six and seven are a couple of my favorite discussions within this book. Anyone can post, but due to the charts, facts, and strong dispositions of his citers, only a few, comparatively, get heard. Amongst the few, are people in America’s eyes, to be thought of as well off, successful, top of the line leaders of their fields and constituents; they are not the average American. Blogs will continue, in my eyes, to an important bi-player in American politics, but the amount of actual diversity being heard/viewed in this political spectrum, will perhaps always be limited to the ones who get the popular vote. There are always outliers and special cases, but predominantly, I feel that blogs whose authors establish, and maintain high ranking, come from “extraordinary backgrounds”, etc, will make the cut of who truly gets listened to and therefore who has a bigger hand/role of what happens or could happen in politics.
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