Information Polity

Coleman, Stephen ; Wright, Scott

2008 Information Polity

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Coleman, Stephen ; Moss, Giles

2008 Information Polity

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This paper examines blogs by three senior politicians as examples of governing at a distance. It considers how the translation of policy messages might be supported by what Scannell has called the 'for-everyone-as-someone' structure of communication. Three communicative characteristics of the blogs are considered: politicians' attempts to seem like ordinary people; their efforts to manage time and appear spontaneous; and their claims to be conversing with and listening to the public. The paper concludes by raising questions about the consequences of digitally mediated intimacy for democratic representation.

Francoli, Mary ; Ward, Stephen

2008 Information Polity

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This article examines and compares the growth and prevalence of MPs' blogging in the UK and Canada. We explore the scope and objectives of such blogs, assess their democratic significance and analyse the institutional and systemic features that help shape the blogosphere. Diverging patterns of adoption were found: the number of blogs have increased in the UK but withered in Canada, where party discipline has been heavily imposed. This illustrates the impact the wider systemic environment can have on the adoption of new technologies. Ultimately, it is concluded that while there is evidence of a potential for MPs' blogs to serve as spaces for debate and conversation, the current majority resemble the traditional style soapbox where few listen let alone take the time to engage. However, there is some early evidence to show that blogs might in fact have a great deal of potential in personality driven, and internal party, election campaigns which have a niche, but highly attentive audience.

Wright, Scott

2008 Information Polity

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This article analyses how and why councillors blog on the government-funded civic-blogging platform, Read My Day. Through a mixture of content analysis and interviews, the article assesses the kinds of communication being facilitated and how the blogs were used during the 2007 local elections. The analysis and interpretations are framed by a critique of the normalisation hypothesis. The article concludes that blogs were largely used as tools of representation rather than for campaigning. The extent to which they strengthen representative practices is mixed. Many bloggers fail to exploit the networking potential of the medium such as creating blog rolls and engaging with the broader blogosphere; this leads to a danger that the politically-interested are talking to each other in isolation. Furthermore, the number of comments is limited, and councillors often do not reply to these: it is typically broadcast, one-way communication. However, there are potentially important positive changes that must be fully considered alongside this. If it is true to say that political communication is increasingly negative, attack-orientated, dominated by political leaders and lacking in substance, then the blogs on Read My Day do go some way to redress this: while it is an example of how technologies are being normalised, it is not quite politics as usual.

Jackson, Nigel

2008 Information Polity

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The existing literature suggests that MPs will use a weblog to promote their activities to constituents in a very similar way to how they use websites. Yet, the discussion of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 suggests that the nature of this debate is evolving. This article, based on a three month content analysis of seven MPs' weblogs, and interviews with four of these blogging MPs, seeks to identify what impact a weblog has on their workload, roles and how they communicate. The findings suggest that contrary to some of the existing literature, MPs do not use a weblog to support existing roles, such as their constituency role. Rather, a weblog appears to have a very narrow and specific role to enhance debate within a separate e-constituency.

Bruns, Axel

2008 Information Polity

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As the odds for a change of government in the Australian elections in late 2007 improve, there is increased conflict not only between the two sides of federal politics, but also between the mainstream press (which in recent years had maintained a largely supportive stance towards the government) and citizen journalists and news bloggers (many of whom have long held sharply critical views). The increasingly visible disconnect between the electorate and many political journalists points to wider observations about the decline of the mass-mediated public sphere, and the emergence of a variety of networked issue publics, possibly acting as public spherules in their own right and interacting with one another in complex patterns of exchange. This article explores the implications of this transformation for citizen engagement in politics and policy development, and applies observations from the analysis of produsage, or user-led content creation, to the democratic process.

Simmons, Tracy

2008 Information Polity

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Much attention has been paid to the personal and intimate nature of blogging. This paper will develop such notions in relation to theories of intimate citizenship; that is, the way in which blogs provide a form of self authorship, not just as a form of expression or creative outlet, but how blogging is connected to the mobilisation of political subjectivity (or subjectivities). Some bloggers use personal experiences, narratives and stories to underpin or motivate campaigns and activists. For example, on the "Mums' Army" blog, women organise campaigns against 'anti-social behaviour' with personal accounts and experiences of perceived social problems in various local settings. This case study illuminates how intimate stories can potentially mobilize previously disengaged citizens to become more politically aware and engaged in their local communities. This is, therefore, an exploratory paper that considers how the cry of the 'personal is political', so redolent of new social movements, is particularly apt in terms of the growing phenomenon of blogging.

Siapera, Eugenia

2008 Information Polity

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This article focuses on blogs as a new media form, and addresses the question of shifts in political subjectivity. The blog is seen as a new way of relating to the public sphere, and to other people, thereby involving new forms of subjectivity and political conduct. Two theories of subjectivity are discussed here, selected because of their explicit links between subjectivity and communication: these are Jurgen Habermas's inter-subjective construction of the subject, and Mark Poster's poststructuralist account of a decentred and fragmented subjectivity. These theoretical subjectivities are subsequently contrasted with the subjectivities enabled by the structural features of blogs. Thus, blog entries; the chronology of blogging; readers' comments; and hyperlinks (internal and external) are examined in terms of the type of subjectivity they support. The analysis reveals that the emerging blogging subjectivity is one that strives for autonomy and self-definition, in a way re-introducing the authorial subject, which was lost in the wake of the poststructuralist critique. On the other hand, the emerging blogging subject is not the originator of all meaning: rather meaning emerges in collaboration with others. The democratic promise of the blog might therefore be located in its potential to deliver an autonomous yet connected subject, and through this to found a new politics revolving around autonomy and solidarity. However, this promise can only be delivered if blogs explicitly address and problematise questions of power and its distribution – and in doing so, they must avoid the twin pitfalls of emotivism, the mere stating of unsupported personal opinions, and empty publicity, the spectacularisation of politics.

2008 Information Polity

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2008 Information Polity

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