Blog Schmog

Early this December, during the fast-paced, anything goes UC election season, Harvard finally got a taste of something mainstream media aficionados have been watching carefully for the past few years: political weblogs.

Of course, blogs aren’t a particularly new trend. The 2004 presidential election saw them widely recognized as an important force by the media, particularly in the ultimately failed Howard Dean campaign. And even at Harvard there were a few campus political blogs already in place before December—former Crimson columnist Andrew Golis and a few of his friends have maintained the excellent “Cambridge Common” (cambridgecommon.blogspot.com) since last April.

But the close-to-home election demonstrated quite nicely the various mechanisms by which blogs influence public opinion. One of those to be sure is timeliness: blogs, unlike the Crimson, update continuously, even at odd hours of the night when both their authors and readers are putting off writing papers. Another factor is simple pluralism: unlike the world at large, Harvard has (by the most generous count) two newspapers, one of which has a publishing cycle longer than the campaign itself.

Before I pat the back of the nascent world of internet journalism and congratulate it on a job well done, however, I want to pause for a moment to think through some of the reasons why we should be wary of accepting too much of our news, if not for campus affairs then at least for global ones, from these unorthodox sources. It’s worth starting with a particular institution which certain elements of the blog community are rightly fond of, something called Technorati.

Technorati is like a “who’s who” in the blogging world—a computer-controlled popularity contest designed to figure out what the most talked about issues are and who is saying the most interesting things about them. It works principally by looking at a blog post and figuring out what links there; the idea being that the most interesting articles are the ones the most people are talking about.

It’s likely no one gets all of their news by scanning the top articles and blogs on Technorati, but this mechanism of determining what’s worth reading nonetheless suggests one problem with trying to get all your news from blogs: if you did, you’d probably get something of a skewed picture—bloggers are a rarified bunch. Writing blogs isn’t particularly difficult but it requires a certain comfort level with technology that is still, by and large, possessed only by a rather select crowd.

What crowd? The top blogs on Technorati suggest some trends. First, technologists rule. The most popular of the lot is “Boing Boing,” a self-proclaimed “directory of wonderful things” which writes a bit about politics and a lot about technology and science fiction. Also in the top 10 are two gadgetry blogs, “Engadget” and “Gizmodo,” each dedicated informants of the latest crazes in Japanese cell phone innovations.

The remainder of the top 10 is a bit better rounded. InstaPundit contains the musings of University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds on war, politics, media, blogging, and technology. The Daily Kos, famous for its role in the Dean Campaign, is a liberal-leaning political blog, as is the group blog The Huffington Post, brainchild of former California gubernatorial candidate Arianna Huffington.

The trouble is that certain issues tend to get magnified by this bunch, and others suppressed. One minor but standout example was pointed out in frustration this past October by Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society and a well known blogger and activist who focuses on issues of technological development in some of the poorer countries in Africa.

In late October a small group of NYU students led a protest in New York outside of a Virgin Megastore to inform consumers of what they thought to be unreasonable copy protection measures put in place by major record labels. Dozens of blogs, Boing Boing among them, picked up on the story, and it spread across interested circles on the ’net like wildfire.

What frustrated Zuckerman was that at roughly the same time a far larger protest was underway in Cairo, Egypt: Sudanese refugees were trying to gain humanitarian assistance and the right to resettle. Their protest drew almost no coverage in the world of popular blogs.

Nevertheless, this doesn’t necessarily represent a problem inherent with blogs. For one, it seems likely it’s a temporary state of affairs: as blogging becomes easier and as technological literacy becomes more widespread, I’d expect that the proportions of bloggers interested in various topics would begin to approach those of the population at large. If there are still problems in coverage thereafter, they’d likely be no worse than the coverage problems inherent in traditional print journalism, and in fact the ease of entry might even make blogging substantially more even-handed.

But in the meantime, it pays to be wary. It’s easy to fall into a trap wherein one believes that by reading the opinions of a few ostensibly well-informed pundits one is oneself well informed. As we saw in December, blogs can do a lot to improve the state of political discourse, and they can do it in ways traditional papers are not yet agile enough to keep pace with. Still, one reason blogs can be so much faster than newspapers is that the latter puts forth an effort to be balanced and well fact-checked, so it’s worth our time to read them and keep our eyes open for incongruities in blog coverage and for stories that might be worthwhile despite a dearth of attention. And if you’re feeling particularly inclined towards procrastination this reading period, well, why not write a blog about what you find?



Matthew A. Gline ’06 is a physics concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.