Club Bloggery pt 2: outside the Echo Chamber

Updated October 12, 2007 14:21:00

In the current political climate, it's no surprise that a number of sessions at the recent Australian Blogging Conference at QUT focussed on the potential for blogs and other citizen journalism sites to impact on political news and punditry.

We have noted previously skirmishes between psephologist bloggers and political commentators, over interpretation of polling results. These spats indicate that the mainstream media (MSM) is finally noticing that their monopoly on political reporting is over.

It's tempting to claim that this growing recognition is a sign that bloggers are storming the gates of the MSM.

Many of the comments on our earlier piece seem to support that view. As one reader wrote,"I believe that Possum [Pollytics] and Bryan at have given me more honest and concise information about this year's political climate than all of the other media websites put together."

But how representative are these blogs, and our readers' experience of them?

The journalistic commentariat in the Canberra press gallery is sometimes accused of constituting an "echo chamber", where members talk, write, and broadcast mainly to themselves and the rest of the political class, and over the heads of most of the citizenry.

If Canberra's "Insiders" are as solipsistic as it's sometimes suggested, could entering their conversation be anything more than a pyrrhic victory? Are the bloggers just a bunch of politics nerds gatecrashing a party of fellow nerds?

Put simply, do these blogs matter to the rest of the electorate?

'Woolly-headed' critics

Clearly, the paid political pundits think so - why else would they spend so much time defending themselves against accusations of bias from the blogosphere, or attacking their "woolly-headed critics" as armchair commentators? But should we take the pulse of blogging from within the echo chamber?

This leads to larger questions.

Election fatigue has set in before the PM has even set a poll date and political advertising, pork barrelling, and mudslinging appear to have had no discernible impact on the declared voting intentions of the electorate, steady since January.

So we could ask: have electors already switched off from the political contest and made up their minds? Have journalists - professional or otherwise - lost their access to the hearts and minds of the electorate, lost their place as opinion leaders and shapers?

Indicators in Australia and elsewhere provide some support for this view. In the network age, newspaper readership is dropping, especially amongst younger readers, and a sense of disconnection from the political process and those who report on it is palpable.(How many Australians would stay at home on election day if voting wasn''t compulsory?).

At the same time, new forms of political engagement are happening outside the bounds of conventional politics.

Many people watch the satire of The Daily Show in the US and The Chaser here, engage in discussions in the blogosphere, or contribute to the independent political activism of MoveOn and GetUp. What remains unclear, certainly in Australia, is whether especially the more active forms of such involvement are going to be able to attract citizen involvement sizeable enough to make a discernible difference.

Are you a PJ or a BB?

Stephen Coleman from the University of Leeds has conducted studies in the UK that point to a growing divide between what he terms "political junkies" (PJs) at one extreme and "Big Brother fans" (BBs) at the other. It's not a criticism of Big Brother watchers in particular, but an attempt to describe a group who are far more invested in the fortunes of their favourite housemate/idol/survivor than to their electoral choices in the political contest.

"What is at risk," Coleman asks, "if the uncomfortable chasm between the engaged and the disenchanted is left unreconciled? Democracy is ultimately unsustainable when the demos is estranged from it. The way to liberate political democracy from its current cultural ghetto requires a new conception of two-way accountability; a creative and exciting use of the new technologies of interactivity; and the nurturing of genuine respect between PJs and BBs."

Many bloggers and blog researchers, including us, say political blogging and other forms of citizen journalism may hold the key to such broader re-engagement with politics.

Such initiatives offer broader perspectives and discussions to those turned off by mainstream journalism's focus on formulaic conflicts between governments and oppositions. It also offers a chance to participate in political deliberation without needing to negotiate party hierarchies.

But do these new forms of engagement really reach out to what Coleman calls the disenchanted, or do they merely marginally expand the PJ demographic? Is the impact of blogs on the political process recognised only because it's a matter of PJs in the mainstream media reporting on PJs outside of the mainstream media?

We're yet to find out.

Watching the watchers

In the US, the Pew Center Internet & American Life Project has conducted large-scale studies tracing the development of blogging and other forms of active content generation amongst citizens for some years now, and is beginning to see signs for longer-term cultural change.

No similar studies exist in Australia to date, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the role played by bloggers and citizen journalists here in 2007 is similar to that of their counterparts in the previous, 2003/4 US election cycle.

At the same time, as blogger Mark Bahnisch suggests in a follow-up post to the Australian Blogging Conference, any direct comparison between Australia and the US is complicated by differences between their electoral and political systems and their citizens.

The rise to prominence of bloggers and citizen journalists there may not necessarily be repeated here, and the wider effects of any such developments might also be different.

What's necessary in Australia, therefore, is for us to study the potential for citizen journalism to reach well beyond the PJs, and Youdecide2007 is one project among many that aims to do so, in the coming election and beyond.

Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, and Barry Saunders are researchers on an ARC-funded project investigating citizen journalism in Australia which has just launched the Youdecide2007 site. Alongside that project, they publish the group blog Gatewatching.

Topics: internet-culture, community-and-society, federal-election-2007, elections, information-and-communication, australia

First posted October 12, 2007 08:33:00