Neither was the printing press when Tom Paine published Common Sense - that doesn’t make his pamphlets just like the Guttenberg Bible. It’s not just the technology that’s important, it’s also literacy, dispersion, and access.

I dunno, maybe it’s just because I’m finally getting around to reading Lenin’s “What is to be done?” in which he outlines arguements and ideological debates that are always rife in those sorts of movements and then basically smacks down a few of the stupider ideas.

Blogs are just an updated version of the radical pamphlets and newspapers of old -and any radical writing about such things tends to emphasise the importance of those in the raising the class conciousness of the proletariat so that the naturally emergent trade unionist urges of the working class can be harnessed and converted into the more fully unified national and/or pan-national class struggle designed not merely to mediate bourgeois society so that it isn’t merely as oppressive as it was before, but to work towards smashing the bourgeois state’s oppression entirely.

One of the major stumbling blocks, as I’ve written of before, is the dissemination of blogs, to be well read, and to gain a wide enough audience, you must exploit the largesse of Dkos/FDL set who have the connections to the upperclasses and their propaganda fonts to get them to advertise your blog; this limits the effective spread of ideas and theorical arguements (the aspect of the political struggle that blogs are more useful than the old hardcopy polemics because of the interactive nature of blogging) transmitted by most blogs to merely the unterblogosphere - as opposed to the uberblogosphere of Kossacks and Hamsher getting interviewed on CNN or FOX news or whatever it was.

Which follows neatly onto the second problem with the current nature of blogging: The disconnect between real world political action and blogging, and this I feel is what Clarke is bemoaning, but the thing is that blogging has adapted to the nature of the theoretical aspect of political struggle admirably, and proven that even if it remained merely the refuge for such theoretical struggle - which always underpin and ends up shaping the nature and method of the practical struggle, and is therefore not a bad thing itself - blogging would not be useless nor would it want for a valid place within a political movement, but what Clarke fails to grasp is that there is no inherent limitation to blogging that means that it has to exist seperate from the practical struggle - but connecting blogging to the practical struggle will not magically happen unless people actually work to make it happen and try (and routinely fail before they a working methodology) to find ways to make blogging intertwine with the practical aspect of the political struggle - and the upside of that is that such an intertwining will end up further empowering the theoretical nature of blogging and begin to invalidate the first stumbling block I just mentioned.

Which is a rather long winded way of saying: Come back and stop being a lazy idiot Clarke, if you want blogging to slice and dice and peel carrots As Well as all the other stuff it is already useful for, then attach blades and motor to the damn thing and make it work like that.

She said, in incomprehensible moon-speak.

Well, yanno. I’ve been on the ‘net since 1987 (no that is not a typo), and as far as I’m concerned, blogs are not new. They’re simply discussion forums in another format. What was once usenet newsgroups are now distributed over websites.

Sure, the ‘net, and newsgroups and fora have been around for longer than some bloggers have been alive. That said, the ability of a blogger or collective of bloggers, as Amanda has pointed out, to more-or-less control the content of a given blog changes the nature of online communication—a blog can’t be completely overrun by people whose ideologiy is hostile to that of the blog founders or owners (though LJ communuty bombings happen, and over time a blog’s emphasis can shift.). In addition, it’s all more widespread now than it was in ‘87. My grandmom reads blogs. In 1987 my grandmom didn’t have a modem.

I think this has been a biggie; in particular, I’ve learned repeatedly the value of assuming that there might be more information on a subject to learn than might be immediately obvious.

But other-minded doesn’t necessarily mean opposition-minded. Blogs connect us to whole new paradigms of thought that can change the way we see the world. Every day, eyes are opened to the value of feminism, or the subtlety of racism, or the frailty of some of our most fundamental assumptions. I think about life, the universe, and everything very differently since joining the blogosphere.

Yeah. That’s what I’m talking about. Any real world change must begin with individual change, and that for me is the greatest thing about blogging. This may say more about higher education than it does about blogging, but my intellectual and moral thinking as an individual has seen more growth from the year and a half or so that I’ve been involved with blogs than the four years I’ve spent in grad school. In fact, blogging has made me less opinionated, more open to other ideas and questioning my own assumptions.

And a lot of us take what we learn from blogging with us out into the real world. I know that I bring what I’ve learned with me into the classroom, and I’ve had several students thank me for pointing them to feminist and anti-racist blogs because it opened their eyes to new ways of thinking (those that don’t copy and paste blog posts and turn them in as position papers, that is).

So yeah, I do think that blogs make a difference.

That’s right, you tell ‘em, Marc!

I think the individual control is critical. Not only does the post-discussion format make this a real writing platform. On the forums, there was almost something sad about striving to be a good, creative writer. But on blogs, it’s expected.

What has all the good writing, the confirmation that there is really Someone Intelligent and Caring out there, actually accomplished—besides making us feel a little better for a few minutes?

That isn’t enough?

Oh, and the Cowboys come pre-f***ed (Bring Back Drew, I say, that’d really do for ‘em)