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Monday, September 08, 2008

What's a Political Blog?

Julia O'Malley, a reporter at the Anchorage Daily News asked if I'd talk to her about about Sarah Palin and Alaska blogs. So we talked this afternoon briefly. I'm not sure we covered the things that are really interesting to me. For instance:

What is a political blog? I think there are a lot of ways of categorizing them. Here are a few:
  1. Partisan political blogs
    These blogs explicitly support a particular political party. They tend to post things that support the candidates of that party and oppose the candidates of other parties. They choose what they post, in part or in whole, on whether it supports their candidates.

  2. Ideological political blogs
    These have a particular political ideology and post things that advance that ideology. There may be overlap with partisan politics, but these blogs need not be tied to a particular political party. Note, the blogger may write from a particular ideological perspective and not even know it. Bloggers may be so totally conditioned by their culture (however narrowly or broadly you want to interpret that) that they assume their world view is the only true world view.

  3. General political blogs
    These blogs take the view that everything is political. They can look at anything and write about the political implications. Here, politics is used in the broadest sense of how power is distributed in society. It looks at knowledge as a form of power, assuming that as people become aware of the side effects of what they do, as they become aware of alternative ways to pursue life, liberty, and happiness, that people then can free themselves from the culturally, economically, religiously, socially conditioned ways of seeing the world that limit their options.

  4. Ostensibly non-political blogs
    These blogs appear to avoid politics altogether. But in a bigger sense, everything affects the distribution of power - including someone's cooperative compliance with unethical orders or someone's simply ignoring the unethical actions of others. Thus, in this sense, everything is political. And blogs that do not address the actions of politicians, government officials, and business leaders are accepting the power status quo. Their lack of protest is taken as a tacit sign of approval. For an excellent discussion of this, see Vaclav Havel's "The Power of the Powerless." This is a discussion of ways the Soviet Union and the Communist government of Czechoslovakia gained power by making citizens comply with meaningless regulations. (It's always easier to see these things when the 'enemy' does them than in one's own culture. But once you see it there, you can start seeing it at home.)

So, when Julia raised the issue of political blogs, it wasn't easy to answer. I'd like to think that I am definitely not in #1. Mostly this blog is #s 2 and 3. Sometimes #4.

I think most personal blogs mix several of these.

And then there's style:
  1. Carefully considered opinion supported with facts, references
  2. Loose and unsupported opinion
  3. Basically facts with some interpretation

And tone used:
  1. Humorous
  2. Serious
  3. Snarky
  4. Respectful
And the media used:
  1. Words
  2. Pictures
  3. Audio
  4. Video
Again, I think blogs tend to mix all the styles, tones, and media, though most lean more in one direction or another.


Does any of this matter? Why not just say it's political or not? The more you know about something, the more complex it gets. At one level, we could just talk about cars. But, if you want to buy one, you have to get more and more specific - types of cars, models, features, etc.

The same is true about how we think, how we know things. But the categories that we use shape how we understand things and are much more amorphous than categories of cars. We could come up with lots of ways to categorize political blogs. We just need to shuffle until we find categories that closely reflect what's out there and are useful for communication. And we need to always be testing our categories.

Think about how the rest of the world is labeling our governor, and how, based on those labels, people think they understand all about her. So, ultimately, the words we use play a large roll in how we think, what we know, and what we think is possible and impossible, and the decisions we make.

I'm NOT saying complicated is good. The better we understand something, the simpler we can explain it. Yet some things are inherently complicated. But somethings are unnecessarily complicated because:
1. The speaker/writer hasn't thought it through enough and it's still confused
2. The speaker/writer doesn't want others to understand
a. so that the writer looks smarter than everyone else (since the writer understands it)
b. because knowledge is a form of power when you have it and others don't

And when we deal with intangibles like power, interpersonal relations, it is difficult to prove something true or false, so it gets even more complicated.

So that's why we need to understand logic, to use words in their agreed upon meanings (or clarify exactly what we mean by them), and to think through the arguments we hear. A good case for this was in this Leonard Pitts column.

"We need change, all right. Change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington. We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington -- throw out the big-government liberals." -- Mitt Romney, Sept. 3, 2008

And then the gorilla run knee socks paint porno on the Cadillac. But school laughed and didn't we sing hats?

Ahem.

Maybe you wonder what the preceding gobbledygook means. I would ask which gobbledygook you mean: mine or Mitt Romney's? If he's allowed to spew nonsense and people act as if he's spoken intelligently, why can't I? If he gets to behave as if words no longer have objective meaning, why can't I?


And you can see how one thing leads to another, so I'll end this in mid....

7 comments:

  1. You are the EF Hutton of bloggers, Steve. Whatever you say has weight because you think before speaking. You have more patience than passion, but you are heavy with both.

    If someone told me that gravity did not exist, I'd smile at them like they were insane. If you said, "Tea, I am working on this theory-- I don't think that gravity exists!" I would probably start floating because of how thoughtful I believe you to be and surely you must be right! I exaggerate, but you are a wise person, like. . . a Yoda figure in the blogging world. ;)

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  2. So are you a kind of celebrity in Alaska? I mean as a well known people in the society.

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  3. Tea, I think you need to stop reading this blog for a while, your head is getting muddled. Yoda doesn't exist and my blog is just one person thinking out loud. This is how cult religions start. A few 'attaboys' are nice now and then, but I don't learn unless you also question what I write.

    Ropi, Alaska is small. According to Wikipedia Budapest has 1,702,279 people in the city proper (not counting the surrounding area). If you took away a million people, Budapest would still have more people than the whole state of Alaska. We have only about 670,000. Anchorage has about 265,000 people. That makes it 60,000 more than Debrecen.

    Celebrity? I'd call it a slighlty large fish in a very small pond.

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  4. Well, actually I need to be working on my classwork late at night instead of surfing blogs. I was razzing you here by comparing you to a little green Muppet.

    I've just ordered a T-84 calculator so I won't be tempted to hop off Excel and onto the internet.

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  5. After your put-down of T & C, I'll question you, Steve.
    Mitt Romney's political diatribe was not exactly gobbledegook.
    Throwing out big-government liberals will bring about change-not change which you or I would welcome, but change nevertheless. As an exhortation to vote for small government illiberals it may be crude, but hardly nonsense.

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  6. First, Tea, I hope you didn't take it as a put down, it wasn't meant that way.

    BGL - did you take the link to Pitts' article and read the whole thing? His point is that the words have no relationship to reality. DC has been Republican controlled for nearly 12 years. He writes:

    "So excuse me, beg pardon, so sorry, but I have to ask: What liberal Washington is he talking about? The federal government has three branches. The legislative, i.e., Congress, was under conservative control from 1995 until 2007. The judicial, i.e., the Supreme Court, consists of nine justices, seven of whom were nominated by conservative presidents. The executive, i.e., the president, is George W. Bush. Enough said.

    Washington is already what Romney wants to make it. Our current state of affairs, love it or loathe it, is indisputably a product of conservative governance. I wish that mattered more than it does."

    He's writing about language,

    "That it doesn't matter much at all you can credit to conservative politicians who have, over the years, trained their followers to respond with Pavlovian faithfulness to certain terms. Say "conservative" and they wag their tails. Say "liberal" and they bare their fangs. More to the point, say either and all thinking ceases, so much so that a representative of the ideology that has controlled most of Washington most of the last 12 years can say with a straight face that his ideology needs to seize control of Washington to fix what is broken there. And people hear this Orwellian doublespeak ... and cheer. Why not? They have been taught that words mean what you need them to in a given moment."

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  7. No put down was there. I need to stop trolling out of sheer boredom and focus on my statistics and chemistry. Given what I have on my plate, I don't have a right to waste time right now. I survive on 6 hours of sleep if that and caffeine.

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