This is part 2 of what I thought would be 2, but will probably be at least 3 or 4, diaries on academic takes on various aspects of what we're doing here at the Daily Kos. Part 1 was on online communities generally; the next installments will likely cover writing on the blogosphere as Habermasian "public sphere" and campaigns' use of the internet.
This installment is about studies of political blogs and blogging. I'll tell you what academics have said, and then the fun part is where I ask some questions and we discuss.
So if that sounds good, come with me...
First, a brief review of why I'm doing these reviews:
As I mentioned in a diary I wrote back in January, I'm working on an ethnographic study of Daily Kos. What that mostly means at the moment is that I spend a lot of time here, take notes about how I use the site and what I notice others doing, and submit my notes to my participant observation class/workshop every few weeks for discussion. (Don't worry, if I ever publish this I'll use pseudonyms for all our user names - it'll be doubly pseudonymous!)
It also means I'm reading the academic literature about online communities and specifically on political blogging. I thought folks here might like to knows some of what academics are saying about "us" - and I'd like to know your thoughts to the academic take on things.
Once again, I'm linking to each article as I discuss it - I've tried to mark links that might not be accessible without a subscription with a "*" - many of the links, star or no, are to pdfs. You've been warned. That out of the way, here we go with my review:
Much writing on the the political blogosphere is relatively shallow. It is based largely on conjecture, on small-scale studies, or at best on reviews of others’ studies.
(If I'm wrong about this and there are good studies I haven't found yet, please let me know! – this is absolutely still all a work-in-progress. And I'm bracketing, for now, an essay I really liked that gets into some more interesting questions; I'm planning to address that one next time.)
Of the literature I've found, the majority is focused on how or whether blogs can influence politics, and on quantitative analyses of blogs. Most articles tend to ignore the questions that interest me most - about how people come to be part of political blogs, what it is like to participate, or how and whether political blogging relates to individuals’ or groups’ activities. Still, it's certainly worth looking at what these studies have found.
The first study I'll discuss is Adamic & Glance's "The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 Election: Divided They Blog". This article examined the link structures of political blogs, using network analysis. They looked both at 1000+ political blogs' linking patterns on a single day, and at 40 top political blogs (20 liberal and 20 conservative) as ranked by BlogPulse (dkos was #1 even way back in 2004; Powerline, Instapundit, LGF, and Atrios came next) over the peak of the election period - 8/29/04 - 11/15/04.
Here is some of what they found (no page numbers as the pdf article doesn't have them!):
- Political blogs mostly link to other blogs on "their" side (i.e., Democratic/left blogs mostly link to other Democratic or left blogs). Only about 15% of links crossed the aisle, so to speak.
- Liberal blogs had 20% more separate posts than conservative ones.
- The conservatives linked to each other at a rate of .2 cross-blog, much more than the rate of .12 for liberal bloggers. Despite this greater cross-linking, the authors' text analysis found no greater uniformity within conservative blogs than within liberal blogs. (The authors make a fairly big deal of the greater cross-blog linking among conservatives; I wonder though if the size of dkos relative to other political blogs is a factor here - there's a lot more to link to internally here, and lots of internal linking on dkos could do a lot to drive down the rate of inter-blog linking.)
- Political blogs often link to "main stream media" - about once every other post. And each side tends to link most to articles and publications that tend to line up with its own positions. ("Fox News and the National Review receive 89% and 92% of their links, respectively, from conservatives, while Salon receives 91% of its links from liberal blogs." But both sides link to the New York Times and Washington Post about the same amount.
- Political blogs also differ in which humor sites they link to, which organizations and which commentators they link to: Liberals link to The Onion, Michael Moore, and MoveOn much more than conservatives; conservatives link to a cartoon called Cox and Forkum(?), Sean Hannity, and the Cato Institute much more than we do.
So, the take-home message from this article is simply - hey, conservatives and liberals don't link to the same places! Not shocking at all, if you ask me - but what do you think? Is this interesting, was there something here you found surprising?
In "How Can We Measure the Influence of the Blogosphere" (2004), Gill reviews the various ways blogs have had, or could have effects on the political outcomes. She reviews a variety of potential measures of blog influence on public opinion and mass media.
Interestingly, she found a quite different top 5 list than Adamic and Glance's only 5 - 11 months earlier. Gill and Adamic & Glance used different tools to measure site/author influence: Gill used blogosphere.us (which she pretty much dismisses) blogrunner.com, blogstreet.com and technorati.com; Adamic & Glance used technorati.com, SiteMeter, blogpulse.com, and TruthLaidBear. Gill's top blogs, that appeared on most of the various tracking sites' Top 15 lists, were: BoingBoing, InstaPundit, Atrios, Scripting News and TPM. I'm not certain why the two lists are as different as they are, though differences in methodology and time of data-gathering could certainly explain it.
Gill is both more interested in tracking the influence of blogs than Adamic and Glance are, and also more skeptical of link-counting as a mechanism for understanding the blogosphere. She points out that blogging's ability to influence is, when compared to media such as newspapers and television, relatively unconstrained by costs - she cites Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) as an example of someone being able to put relatively little money into a blog that still has a great deal of impact. Gill's other main contributions are to note that campaigns now have blogs, and to point to a few anecdotes of blogs' campaigns or concerns having an impact on politics - the Trent Lott/Strom Thurmond thing, and a slashdot sting of a "fake" Microsoft ad.
Mostly I'm just somewhat surprised that DailyKos wasn't in most of her list - there's some overlap, of course. I think Adamic and Glance's choice of tracking sites might be better - dkos was either 1st or 2nd on all 4 of their ranking sites. Do people know things about how these tracking mechanisms work? What's your sense of what's best? I don't know much about any of these.
How is that you think we in the blogosphere manage to have influence? How should we measure it? Are links interesting, and if so, for what?
One whole article (Su et al, "Politics As Usual in the Blogosphere", 2005) is dedicated to analyzing the differences between political blogs and personal/hobby-oriented blogs in terms of their "community aspects." Their big conclusion, and I'm not making this up, is that political bloggers’ goals for their blogs are different than those of personal or hobby-related bloggers – political bloggers are more interested in influence and reputation (3, 10-11)!!!
Drezner & Farrell's 2004 article "The Power and Politics of Blogs" is the most interesting and sophisticated of the articles I'm reviewing here. After noting that "the median income generated by a weblog is zero dollars" and that "blogging as an activity is almost exclusively a part-time, voluntary enterprise," they place the puzzle mentioned by Gill at the center of their analysis:
Given the disparity in resources and organization vis a vis other actors, how and when can a collection of decentralized, contrarian, nonprofit websites exercise influence over political and party outcomes? (4)
They argue that because of the networked nature and skewed distribution of blog readership (a few blogs like dkos have the vast majority of readers; most blogs have very very few readers), "a few 'elite' blogs can operate as both an information aggregator and as a 'summary statistic' for the whole blogosphere" (4). So, political media people then read these "elite" blogs and take on their stories. And why do media people pay attention to blogs? For four reasons:
- material incentives - blogs provide free content (15).
- personal network ties - many prominent bloggers were journalists or other media professionals before starting to blog (15).
- expertise - bloggers, unlike most journalists, can specialize on one issue or topic (16).
- speed - bloggers, unlike journalists, can post their analyses and impressions immediately after (or even during) an event or news story, and get research going quickly and collectively (16-17).
So, put simply, blogs can influence politics because media opinion-makers take them seriously. They also mention two important constraints on the potential influence of blogs. First, resource constraints - most bloggers have to earn their main income elsewhere, and so have limited time and money for blogging (19-20). The second, and more interesting for us here at daily kos, is that
...powerful actors in politics and political communications have already moved down the learning curve in response to weblogs. Astute political actors can read blogs as easily as media professionals, and use that information to predict the direction of future news cycles. (20)
What do you make of Drezner & Farrel's analysis? How much of the effect DailyKos is able to have on the political world is through making stories happen in the MSM?
What's missing from much of this analysis is anything like what the concept of "netroots" means to me - that blogs bring lots of people together who might not otherwise have found each other, to do things (not just influence media) we might not otherwise have been able to do. The last article I'll mention, then, is "New Media and Internet Activism: From the ‘Battle of Seattle’ to Blogging" (Kahn & Kellner 2004*) is less a research article (at least from my sociologist's perspective), and more an analysis of the radical potential of the internet. So it sums up nicely some of what blogs can do:
Political bloggers have demonstrated the ability to influence decision making, with the campaign the focus of attention upon the racist remarks made by then Speaker of the House Trent Lott, and the creation of a media frenzy over the dishonest reporting that was exposed recently at the New York Times. In the first case, Lott’s remarks had been buried in the back of the Washington Post until communities of bloggers began publicizing them and generating the public and media interest that then led to his removal. In the second, bloggers again rabidly set upon the newsprint giant, whipping up so much controversy and hostile journalistic opinion that the Times’s executive and managing editors were forced to resign in disgrace.
However, the success of blogging should not be judged solely on whether it generates obvious political effects. As alluded earlier, bloggers are expanding the notion altogether of what the internet is and how it can be used. Increasingly, bloggers are not tied to their desktops, writing in virtual alienation from the world, but are posting pictures, text, audiom and video on the fly from PDA devices and cellphones. (92-3)
So, what do you think about what blogs can actually do in the world?
Bibliography
Adamic, Lana A. and Natalie Glance. 2004. "The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog." Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Link discovery. http://portal.acm.org/...
Drezner, Daniel W. and Henry Farrell. 2004. "The Power and Politics of Blogs." Prepared for delivery at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. http://queensu.ca/...
Gill, Kathy. 2004. "How Can We Measure the Influence of the Blogosphere?" Paper prepared for WWW2004. http://faculty.washington.edu/...
Katz, James, Ronald E. Rice and Philip Apsden. "The Internet, 1995-2000: Access, Civic Involvement, and Social Interaction." American Behavioral Scientist. 45(3): 405-419.
Nardi, Bonnie A., Diane J. Schiano, Michelle Gumbrecht and Luke Swartz. 2004. "Why We Blog." Communications of the ACM. 47:41-46.
Raine, Lee. 2005. "The State of Blogging." Data memo for Pew/Internet. http://www.pewinternet.org/...
Su, Norman Makoto, Yang Wang and Gloria Mark. "Politics as Usual in the Blogosphere." Proceedings of the 4th International Workship on Social Intelligence Design. http://www.isr.uci.edu/...