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February 19, 2005
Do Blogs Influence Debate in International Affairs?
Scholars Daniel W. Drezner and Henry Farrell raised an important question about blogs and international affairs in the November/December issue of Foreign Policy. The article, headlined "Web of Influence," asked: "Political scandals are one thing, but can the blogosphere influence global politics as well? Compared to other actors in world affairs—governments, international organizations, multinational corporations, and even nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—blogs do not appear to be very powerful or visible," they wrote. "Even the most popular blog garners only a fraction of they Web traffic that major media outlets attract." They further noted:
According to the 2003 Pew Research Center for the People and the Press Internet Survey, only 4 percent of online Americans refer to blogs for information and opinions. The blogosphere has no central organization, and its participants have little ideological consensus. Indeed, an October 2003 survey of the blogosphere conducted by Perseus concluded that “the typical blog is written by a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends and classmates on happenings in her life.” Blogging is almost exclusively a part-time, voluntary activity. The median income generated by a weblog is zero dollars. How then can a collection of decentralized, contrarian, and nonprofit Web sites possibly influence world politics?Mr. Drezner and Mr. Farrell argue that "Blogs are becoming more influential because they affect the content of international media coverage." They recalled that "Journalism professor Todd Gitlin once noted that media frame reality through “principles of selection, emphasis, and presentation composed of little tacit theories about what exists, what happens, and what matters.” Increasingly, journalists and pundits take their cues about “what matters” in the world from weblogs," they wrote. "For salient topics in global affairs, the blogosphere functions as a rare combination of distributed expertise, real-time collective response to breaking news, and public-opinion barometer. What’s more," the scholars maintain, "a hierarchical structure has taken shape within the primordial chaos of cyberspace. A few elite blogs have emerged as aggregators of information and analysis, enabling media commentators to extract meaningful analysis and rely on blogs to help them interpret and predict political developments." Here's more of their thought-provoking opinion. I highly recommend it for anyone seeking a perspective on the influence, if any, that bloggers and new media have on shaping debates on international affairs.
Posted by Munir Umrani at February 19, 2005 08:28 PM
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