Crossing blogs out of the equation.

If a tree falls in the woods but no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? This same question can be applied to the concept of the Joe Average Blogger. Of course anyone can write a blog about anything nowadays, in this case politics, but if no one comes across it the work will go unheard. As Hindman himself puts it, "it may be easy to speak in cyberspace but it remains difficult to be heard."

With this said, the democracy of the Internet which people praise is put to question and thus the term democracy proves clearly a misnomer. These political elites, which dominate the ever diminishing online political audience, are fueled by the extreme openness of the Internet. As with all other things on the Internet, as consumers in the vastness of cyberspace, we create filters which help us decide between what we see as good, reliable online content, and what could be your Joe Average ranting out his opinions. Not that his opinions are not correct but this is where we can draw back on the theory of scholarly lawyers. Your average surfer who spends most of their time on social networks rather than political sites would most likely trust the opinion of someone, or in this case a site, with credentials and all the other assets that make these political elites appear to be more reliable. Furthermore if we think about the structure of the sites, a big name site is more likely to provide the links, keywords and use the specific techniques we've learned about that make their site more searchable and thus more visible; things that Joe Average might not be thinking about when creating his blog. 

For politicians the internet is proving to be a great source to have at hand. As we saw in the 2008 Obama campaign and the recent 2012 campaign for Ron Paul for the republican nomination, both parties gathered a significant amount of financial support from the online community. Going online gave Obama a great advantage, with young supporters and those non millionaires who with a click of a button could add what they could to ensure his success.  

The topic of politics is a touchy subject and almost always inevitably bias to ones own opinions which divides the political online audience only further. People are going to look for what they agree with and for someone who is not an expert on politics, as are many people in our demographic, are going to find what's most visible to them, the sites most easily heard, crossing out small blogs from the equation.