This diary is intended primarily to ask for help from the collected knowledge of the dKos community. Along the way, I'll also introduce myself and the project I'll be working on this semester.
About me: I'm a PhD student in Sociology at UC Berkeley. Before starting grad school 2.5 years ago, I worked at and then ran a small non-profit in Philadelphia. I've been political in some sense my whole life - from protesting Apartheid and U.S. imperialism and so on with my mom when I was little, to queer and feminist activism in college and after, to organizing friends to volunteer for the Dems in 2004 and 2006. I've been a very regular lurker (and occasional poster) since 2004, sometime in the run-up to the election.
As you may have guessed, the project I'm working on is about Daily Kos...
My academic (and personal) interest is in political participation. More specifically, I'm interested in exploring the different ways different kinds of people think about and relate to politics (electoral and otherwise). (Even more specifically/academically stated, I'm interested in understanding the genesis and maintenance of the uneven distribution of what social theorist Pierre Bourdieu terms "political competence.")
My credentials in terms of Daily Kos are: I have spent between 5 minutes and 5 or more hours on this site almost every day for the last 2.3 years. Thus far I've mostly read front page stories and recommended diaries - but within that I read everything from Cheers & Jeers to various pie fights to candidates' and action diaries to democratic strategy to global warming to... you get the idea. For those of you who pay attention to these sorts of things, my UID doesn't reflect my full tenure on the site as I changed my real-life name and thereafter my handle since I first signed up. My old handle was Bec H. (Don't worry, I didn't change my name to Fraggle. It's really Daniel.)
I don't post much, mostly because I tend to want to ensure anything I write, even a comment, is both 1) carefully written (and sometimes researched), and 2) not a repeat of something someone else has said/written. So by the time I do thing number 1, it's usually too late in terms of thing number 2. I'm going to work on being a bit more spontaneous, though.
So this semester, I'm planning to put my addiction to Daily Kos to good use - I'll be focusing on Daily Kos for a participant observation/ethnography project. This is the first diary in a series of (hopefully somewhat regular) diaries I'm planning for throughout the project. Much as I love Daily Kos, I'm not interested so much in this site itself as I am in the question of how political blogs and the "netroots" might (or might not) be changing who participates in politics and how they/we understand and engage with the political field.
That said, Daily Kos is a logical place to start for a number of reasons: because I myself have spent so much time here over the last 2+ years; because of its sheer size and fame; because of the relative diversity of progressive/left/Democratic/liberal perspectives and people who are here; because of the real-life communities and institutions it has spawned.
My initial sense of the academic literature on political blogs is that it's mostly focused on how and/or whether blogs influence policy and/or electoral outcomes. While that's obviously an important question, I'm much more interested in what dKos is like for the folks who come here, why people come here, how they (we) use/interact with the site, what it means for them, and how it influences/interacts with how they think about/engage in politics and social change.
I haven't begun a formal review of non-academic reporting on dKos or political blogs yet, though I seem to recall reading at least a few good articles and a lot of hyperbole along the lines of "bloggers are scary/stupid/fighting each other/imploding" etcetera.
In addition to work published outside this site, I know there are great analyses of Daily Kos from within the dKos community. Jotter's excellent statistical summaries and the demographic polls DrSteveB has done give numerical pictures of the activities and people here. And the various newbie/orientation diaries by a wide array of posters describe the workings of the community and often add insights about how different users relate to the site.
It's hard to argue that anything is truly "missing" from dKos as it's nearly impossible to know everything about what is here; that said, what I hope to add is a systematic examination of the ways that Daily Kos connects people to politics. I'll do that using the tools of participant observation (which are traditionally used for in-person interactions, but it's not unheard of to do internet ethnographies), including just hanging out here a lot (I do that already, but I'm going to try to actually comment more), taking lots of notes, seeking to ask people questions one-on-one online and offline, going to any real-world gatherings I can, and looking back over lots of archives.
As I work, I'll post diaries which report on my analyses up to that point. I'll start with reviews of academic writing about topics relevant to daily kos and this project: about daily kos, about political blogs, about the phenomenon of online communities overall, and about political participation. As I start to develop tentative answers to my own questions about how this site affects or facilitates people's relationship to the political sphere, I'll post those as well.
All that said, this is very much the beginning of the project, and my perspective and research question/s will almost certainly evolve over the course of the semester.
So that's the who I am and the what I'm doing parts of the diary. Now I hope I've convinced at least a few of you that this might be an interesting and/or worthwhile project. And I hope you'll help me with some of the questions below.
I've done some initial literature searching, but I'm sure I haven't found everything, and I certainly don't yet have a sense of which articles and authors are worthwhile. I'm looking both for academic (i.e., published in peer-reviewed journals or books) and non-academic articles and studies.
- What are some particularly good, bad, or otherwise important writings about Daily Kos?
- What are some articles you like (or hate) about political blogs generally?
- Any good leads on writing about online communities even more broadly?
And then, I've got some sense of this from hanging around a lot, but I'm sure I've missed a great deal:
- What are resources on dKos itself that are important for understanding Daily Kos?
- Do you have any suggestions for how you think I might most fruitfully go about studying dKos?
Finally, I'll just ask directly my main question:
- Has Daily Kos changed how you think about or relate to politics? if so, how?
Feel free to answer any or all or none of the questions, and let me know if you have any other suggestions... (you can also tell me you think this is a dumb idea, or has already been done quite well by someone else and there's no need for me to do this, although I won't like hearing that very much.)