Wired News: Clark Campaign to Debut Big Blog was commented upon by The Register in One blogger is worth ten votes – Harvard man
Wired author, Chris Ubrich, writing about the Wesley Clark campaign for Demoratic Party nomination in 2003 writes:
“Writer and Linux Journal senior editor Doc Searls said he was impressed with the number of ways the Clark Community Network gave users to participate.
“In a networked democracy, participation is key. You need an active constituency, not just a crowd of supporters waving banners,” he said.
Winer said he was encouraged that campaigns were starting to recognize the value of blogs to the democratic process.
“A voter with a weblog is ten times more powerful than a voter without a weblog, because there’s more to voting than just going in and flipping a lever,” he said. “
Andrew Orlowski’s sarcastic commentary has a thought provoking punch line:
“Beneath the headline “Clark Campaign to Debut Big Blog” - a democratic daisycutter of weblog, we imagine - Winer is cited, thus:
“A voter with a weblog is ten times more powerful than a voter without a weblog, because there’s more voting than just going in and flipping a lever.”
Too true, Dave, too true - but at the end of the day, it’s the guy who has gotten the most real levers flipped who wins. That’s what matters: the acquisition and exercise of real power. Somehow we can’t escape the wicked thought that what Dave is really trying to say, is that people who use his weblog software are more powerful - because they’re using his weblog software. And that, in a nutshell, is how weblog software vendors measure ‘success’. We can coin a phrase for this: “Emergent Democracy” - which translates to “how many times people use my software”. For this seems to be the only defining characteristic of this particular version of democracy.
So Orlowski tries to burst the bubble of blogboosting hubris with the hot needle of political reality.
This is a characteristic of the giddy kind of people who define themselves through computer-mediated relationships [my italics]. They get terribly excited about people just like themselves using the same software, when all that bounces back from these dead phosphorous LCD screens is something that approximates their own reflection, and isolation. Bits and bytes are useful - but they’re not where real power is exercised. And fantasies are popular here - “blog shares” mirrored Wall Street, in a harmless way, and “Emergent Democracy” mirrors real power in an equally harmless way too.
And, of course, in hindsight this self delusion had its denouement in the Howard Dean campaign which fell flat on its face due, in no small part, to incestuous self deception of the Dean blogging community (see Exiting Deanspace by Clay Shirkey).
Posted by markp at November 14, 2005 12:14 PM | TrackBack