Circumventing the Anti-Democratic Infrastructure of the Blogosphere

Rarely has the phrase the marketplace of ideas been so literal as with blogs. In order to compete in the blogosphere, a citizen has to compete with millions of other voices. Those who come out on top in this struggle for eyeballs are not middle schoolers blogging about the trials of adolescence, nor are they a fictitious collection of pajama-clad amateurs taking on the old media from the comfort of their sofas. Overwhelmingly, they are well-educated white male professionals. Nearly all of the bloggers in our census were either educational elites, business elites, technical elites, or traditional journalists.

Matthew Hindman, The Myth of Digital Democracy (128)

It’s difficult to argue against Hindman’s solid social science: the political blogosphere really is an even more entrenched bastion of elites than the traditional media, if the question of which blogs are being read and most highly ranked in search engine algorithms (which Hindman has also convincingly argued amounts to the same thing) is taken into account. Three years after Hindman published his argument, the situation is not likely to have changed much among the top 100 or so political blogs. In fine, the blogs that have the most influence—or any influence at all—on American politics, if the demographics of their authors is any indication, reflect the viewpoints of highly educated white male technocrats like Markos Moulitos of dailykos.com, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and Glen Reynolds of Instapundit.

Obviously, there is room for disagreement among this group, particularly between the partisans of left and right. But all essentially reinforce the central narrative of the elite (as opposed to those whose voices are not as well-heard, including those who don’t blog or even read blogs) that, for example, the elite, whether left or right, is alone trustworthy to care-take US politics. 

In my experience as a reader of blogs (I’m a fairly typical audience member according to Hindman—white, male, fairly well educated and in the 45+ age group), I’ve come to understand that central narrative of this group. Admittedly my methodology for reconstructing it is nowhere near as rigorous as Hindman’s is generally. In any case, I think more careful research would confirm that this group shares several basic premises the general population may not share, besides this faith in the abilities of technocrats.

Above all, in my experience, they share a faith in the established political system to triage the nation’s political, economic and social problems and solve them eventually. This includes a faith not only in the institutions of government laid out in the Constitution but also in those that have become established since the founding, particularly the two main political parties (which entails a concomitant skepticism of third parties and unaffiliated radicals). Furthermore, I think members of this group tend to view themselves as entitled and competent participants in an imaginary national dialogue whose twists and turns are largely determined by the attentions of well-established institutions (including the traditional news media). This last point subtly implies a belief in or lack of concern about the exclusivity of the class of participants in that discussion.

There may also be more specific agreements among this class of bloggers, such as a belief to some degree in American exceptionalism, in a market more or less free from government interference, in the essential soundness of American-style democracy as the best of all possible democracies. But I think the room for disagreement on these specifics between right-wingers like Reynolds and Erick Erickson of Red State and lefties like Marshall and Moulitos is much larger than on the more general faith in the legitimacy of established political institutions, which, I would argue, is probably what most separates these bloggers from lesser read ones and from the public in general, at least in terms of ideology.

The effect of this essential agreement among these elite bloggers is to limit both the number of issues covered at any one time and the number of points of view about them, which in turn limits the number of solutions proposed to deal with any given problem to a narrow range of options around which consensus has the potential to grow. The consensus that matters here, of course, is not among the citizenry, which is deemed impossible to gauge anyway, but among the elites who have power to make change happen (or appear to happen), which means elected and appointed officials, but also lobbyists and business, media and educational leaders. And of course it must be said that these bloggers are not the main influencers in this process of elite consensus building. They are just the internet presence of the elite that existed offline before there even were blogs or the internet.

While I think Hindman is essentially right about the anti-democratic effects internet architecture has had on the blogosphere, thanks mainly to the built-in bias toward old-school elites (and moneyed interests) among bloggers, I think Hindman overlooks a couple of areas where the immediacy of the Internet has had a more democratizing effect. Again, I don’t have the social science to back me up, but I think it would support my intuition.

I was a member from 2003-2010 of DemocraticUnderground.com, a site that essentially competed with dailykos for left-wing internet users looking for a forum to share views about politics. Anyone can join discussions in the forums there, but paying members of DU, as it’s called, are able to post their forum posts on their own “Journals,” which are basically blogs. While the (white male technocrat) administrators of DU shared much of the worldview of the blogging elite Hindman discusses—a couple of them had worked for the centrist Democratic Leadership Council before starting DU—the site’s members were a much more diverse group, originally including everyone from Trotskyists, Greens, and Naderites to blue dog Democrats and even the occasional “Freeper,” as members of the right-wing FreeRepublic.com were called.. (After Obama's election, the administrators aggressively purged most of DU's lefties deemed disloyal to the Democratic Party. Some of us banned folk think the Freepers were allowed to remain.)

The membership (ca. 125,000 by its tenth year) skewed white, judging from the photo gallery of members, but was significantly more diverse than similar forums on the right, for sure, and also than Hindman’s sample of elite bloggers. At least two women and one African American male ranked consistently among the top five Journals, as counted daily, weekly and for all time. It is highly likely, however, that those most viewed Journals were authored by well-educated professionals used to working with words, thus, bearing out in part Hindman's observation of the fractal-like nature of sub-groups on the internet in their resemblance to the Internet as a whole. DU, however also had a rating system for any post on its forums (not just those being posted on Journals) that started a thread. The most popular of these attained "Greatest" status and a spot on the "Greatest Page" for 48 hours. While the administrators' rare posts almost always wound up there, just as often so did many of the most radical (i.e., most critical of the Democrats from a left-perspective) posts on the forum, which definitely did not reflect the viewpoint of the administrators.

DU's readership. granted, was small compared to that of, say, NYTimes.com, but at least among this group, less popular viewpoints were being heard and debated. Some of these would trickle up the left blogosphere even to the mainstream, lefty counterpoints to Hindman's example of the "Rathergate memo" from  Free Republic. A similar diffusion of ideas takes place on dailykos.com, which also gives members the power to create their own blogs, and on other political sites across the internet. There is really no real-world counterpart to this aspect of blogging, which allows all comers to join in the debate, come what may. The closest comparison might be to town halls or civic clubs, but these internet forums are on all the time. Of course there is also a hierarchy among these forums, some (most likely the most well-connected to elite funders and sponsors) more populous and livelier than others, but it seems to me that if there is a democratizing effect on the internet, it will be found here, where the members debate, rather than on the surface where the elite bloviate amongst themselves.

One final note: Hindman makes no mention of Twitter, as far as I can tell, and barely any of Facebook. I think it's significant that these social media tools were associated with the Arab Spring, Wisconsin resistance to Gov. Scott Walker's union-busting and Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011. If those are not good examples of the internet's power to democratize, I don't know what is.