Blogging's role

There was a discussion about political blogging on this morning's BBC Sunday AM programme. The protagonists were the Tory blogger Iain Dale and the Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. The discussion is 28 minutes into the programme. I have taken this link from Harry's Place, which comments: "So why does the rightwing Dale defend the messy but essentially democratic and egalitarian nature of the blogosphere while the ostensibly leftwing Alibhai-Brown sniffishly compares bloggers to 'bores in bars'?"

That question seems to me less important than the debaters' conclusions; Dale's are wrong and Ms Alibhai-Brown's right. There are good and bad blogs, but the medium overall impoverishes our democracy. So far from being "democratic and egalitarian", the proliferation of political blogs narrows the range of opinion presented in the public square, to the extent that blogs are taken seriously as an intermediary for debate. The reason for this is implied by the legal scholar Cass Sunstein in a thoughtful Madisonian argument about the Internet and democracy. He is talking about the ability of consumers of news and comment to filter out material with which they disagree (emphasis added):

With a dramatic increase in options, and a greater power to customize, comes an increase in the range of actual choices. Those choices are likely, in many cases, to mean that people will try to find material that makes them feel comfortable, or that is created by and for people like themselves. This is what the Daily Me is all about. Of course, many people seek out new topics and ideas. And to the extent that people do, the increase in options is hardly bad on balance; it will, among other things, increase variety, the aggregate amount of information, and the entertainment value of actual choices. But there are serious risks as well. If diverse groups are seeing and hearing different points of view, or focusing on different topics, mutual understanding might be difficult, and it might be hard for people to solve problems that society faces together. If millions of people are mostly listening to Rush Limbaugh and others are listening to Fox News, problems will arise if millions of other people are mostly or only listening to people and stations with an altogether different point of view.

This appears to me to be not only a serious risk but a description of how blogging in fact works. The supposed conversation that blogging gives rise to is more like an echo chamber. When it's then diverted towards particular targets, the consequences are horrifying. Ms Alibhai-Brown referred in her comments to the overwhelmingly abusive character of the emails she receives from her journalism. You can see further evidence on the Guardian's "Comment is Free" site, where the aim of drawing readers into a conversation has clearly not been realised. Blogging is a fact of political life, and we have to get used to it. But deliberative democracy doesn't work that way.

UPDATE: Philosophers Jeremy Stangroom and Chris Bertram have debated similar questions in The Philosophers' Magazine. I share Stangroom's view on the merits of blogging: "My argument is that when a whole medium is characterised by entrenched positions then you tend to get heat not light."