Richard Poe
Monday, Oct. 7, 2002

The answer to all three questions is the same. Talk radio, webzines, list servers, message boards and now blog sites have one thing in common. They are interactive. They let people talk back. Consequently, it is physically impossible for new media to do what old media did – that is, to shove unpopular ideas down people's throats and pretend that the audience likes it.

Such tactics simply don’t work in the blogosphere.

When people get a chance to speak without censorship, they say things you would never hear on CNN or NBC. They vent their contempt for the Left, and express their resentment of Big Media for pushing leftist ideas.

No gatekeeper or force field excludes leftists from the blogosphere. It’s just that their feeble little voices get drowned out by the crowd.

I should probably explain what the blogosphere is. Even some Web-savvy people still don’t know. When I asked my programmer in August to install a blog on my RichardPoe.com Web site, he responded,"What’s a blog?"

According to Samizdata.net’s official glossary of blogospherical jargon, a blog is defined as:

Noun. A contraction of weblog, a form of on-line writing characterised in format by a single column of chronological text, usually with a sidebar, and frequently updated.

Blogs or weblogs are online diaries. Day by day, the blogger adds his thoughts and observations. Often the entries are mundane, ranging from recipes and auto repair tips to lamentations over the blogger’s love life. But the best blogs comment on the news of the day, often intelligently, each entry accompanied by links to the news articles in question.

"So what?" some readers may ask. "Why should I waste time plowing through the amateur punditry of a gaggle of lovelorn techno-geeks?"

Ah, but that’s the beauty of blogging. The system is self-selecting. The worst blogs sink to the bottom. No one sees them. The best blogs rise to the top, borne aloft by the sheer number of bloggers who link to them.

Weblogs have existed, in one form or another, since at least 1994. But today, free, easy-to-use blogware enables just about anyone to start a blog. The blog osphere has grown exponentially in the last two years, with hundreds of thousands – maybe millions – of new blogs coming online.

Most are worthless. But the self-selecting nature of the blogosphere ensures that the best, most popular blogs are easy to find. The top sites are linked everywhere, and the more links that point to them, the more prominently the Google.com search engine displays them.

Consider how this very article you are reading came into being. I logged onto the popular blog site Samizdata.net. There I saw an entry by London-based blogger Brian Micklethwait poking fun at an article by James Crabtree in the British socialist journal New Statesman. Mickelthwait, in turn, had discovered Crabtree’s Marxist screed through a reference on Instapundit.com, another blog site.

The offending article was called "Bloggers of the Left, Unite!" Clicking the link, I read:

Blogs are becoming the medium of choice for politically attuned members of the digital generation. Like talk radio, they are dominated by the political right. Why has the left ceded this potentially influential medium without a fight? … Right-wing bloggers are thus creating their own world, in which their truth exists often without debate.

Without debate? Who is this cyber-commie trying to kid? Conservative blogs thrive by facilitating debate, not avoiding it.

Take Crabtree’s own article. Crabtree violated blog etiquette by failing to link to the "right-wing" blogs he condemned. But his conservative rivals did the opposite. They gleefully linked to Crabtree’s Bolshevik rant, the better to ridicule it.

Each "right-wing" blogger courteously provided links, not only to Crabtree’s piece, but to the blog where he found Crabtree’s piece. Thus bloggers can backtrack through a chain of commentary from one blog to the next, and comment on each others’ comments. A hot debate can girdle the globe within hours.

Instead of suppressing Crabtree, conservative bloggers helped publicize him. Not that it will do him any good. Only a handful of fellow leftists will take Crabtree’s polemic seriously. The rest of us will roll on the floor, convulsed by paroxysms of side-splitting, rib-cracking – and, to borrow a phrase from Samizdata.net – "pant-wetting" laughter.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Media Bias

Editor's note:
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