I'm sorry if this is rushed. I'm suffering from a stomach ache, a headache, and being rushed to go gambling with group of Kossacks at the Bellagio. : )
I was at the Black Caucus meeting this morning and I sat in with a number of bright and articulate Kossacks . We mostly focused on how to increase activism and participation in the blogosphere in the African American community, particularly with the younger generation. The reasons that the the African American voice is not as strong, we surmise, is due to 1) access and 2)relevance/lack of interest.
In terms of access, the number one roadblock is that blogging is a "luxury good." One has to have a computer and internet access to participate in this sphere. Socio-economic situations obviously matter. We spoke about some proposed initiatives in certain municipalities to provide free access to wireless internet. Needless to say, the US is lagging countries such as Singapore and Finland in this aspect. What can we do about this? That is the question and there are no clear answers. Needless to say, in this Bush economy, access to the internet and the blogoshere will only suffer.
As for increasing the collective voice of the black community that have access, one idea would be to have blogs reach out to young African Americans using myspace.com. Knowing that perhaps in 10 years blogging might be as popular as texting, we should nevertheless take the initiative even now to market the blogosphere. We mostly spoke abtractly of course, but the discourse was in the spirit of Dean's efforts of building the Democratic Party from the ground up by having a strategy focusing on local and state politics. Young African Americans should be concerned about the rising costs of education and diminishing student aid. Advertising liberally on sites like myspace.com seems like a great idea. Also, encouraging churches and schools to create their own blogs or participate in existing ones also might go a long way in increasing readership in the black community.
Finally, we spoke briefly about Net Neutrality and the possibility, if passed, of creating a two tier system that would be greatly disadvantageous to the black community in particular. The internet is a public good, and we should throw our full support in defeating any proposal to censure or curb access to this medium.