voice of whom

In the Myth of the Digital Democracy, Hindman analyzes the flow of the communication between political blogs. Hindman demonstrate that blogs became the major media in political landscape and blogs are important because anybody can have a political voice online. However, Hindman says that the major leading political opinions in the blogs do not represent the public. 

Everybody can write a blog and therefore blogs are not reliable. Hindman refers that because of two characteristic: partisanship and inaccuracy. He writes that blogging allows political discourse less dominated and ordinary citizens to amplify their voice. Blogging is very democratic and that enlarges political public sphere. However, he points out who does get heard in the blogging sphere. 

Web traffic is not distributed equal. It is the Winner-take-all system. Among Web traffic, political traffic takes a tiny proportion. Moreover, among the political traffic, the small set of winners receives most of the traffic and many other tiny web sites get last of them. Hindman derives how the public the networked public sphere actually is from the web traffic structure. Because there are little consume of political content, it is inevitable that there are few resources. The limit of the links created limits content that citizens see. 

The top-ten bloggers are mostly highly educated white males whose occupation is themselves as a journalists or business elite background. Therefore, Hindman concludes that the voice we hear from blogging is not the voice from average citizens but the voice from elite such as op-ed columnists. Their online audiences are concentrated just like the audiences for print media.

Hindman’s argue is absolutely true in online political media, even from blogs. It is true that internet allows voices from anybody. However, in cyberspace people tend to ignore articles or postings from less known publisher than well-known one, I mean already well-known in off-line world, whom Hindman refers “elite”. It is easily comparable with the numbers of comments between a not known blogger and one of the top-ten bloggers.

Those “elites” are not free from political opinion of the big media such as TV and newspaper because their living is closely related with it. In the winner-take-all system, the small websites(or blogs) are hardly heard to us with such a little links and content thus we do not really have “middle”. When the small website that receives most traffic combines commertial purpose, the political flow will be limited with the ideology of the capital. Not like the broadly accepted assumption that internet allows decentralization of opinion, we have given up the right to hear the voices from general citizens when we click the links that connects to the major sites.