Why Blogs are so Cool

Blogs are a very new and very different sort of media. They are an interactive, populist driven, non-corporate source of news and commentary.

Greg Ruggiero of the Immediast Underground said, "Media is a corporate possession...You cannot participate in the media. Bringing that into the foreground is the first step. The second step is to define the difference between public and audience. An audience is passive; a public is participatory. We need a definition of media that is public in its orientation."

That is what blogs potentially do for us; they take us from being a passive audience to being participants in public dialog while providing news and information. In essence blogs are much more democratic.

This phenomenon has been fun to watch on several different accounts. One that I am acutely aware of is critical mass. That is the number of people that it takes plugging into a blog before that blog becomes dialectic. Even in the age of instant messaging and email, most people are not comfortable commenting in an open dialog. Early on blogs were the homogenous domain young geeks. But, because blogs are so powerful, others soon started taking note. The geeks were joined in this community first by new junkies. Through the last couple of national campaign cycles I have found blogs to be the source for information. I am often directed to a mainstream media from a blog, but blogs serve as a filter quickly and easily directing me to the information I want. Often, especially during the election cycle, blogs are the only source of information for some things of interest. Blogs are frequently the source for breaking news.

Another interesting thing to watch develop has been the ethos of the bloggosphere. As a source of news and commentary blogs tend to be much more raw than the sanitized versions of the news found on mainstream sources. Because no one is trying to sell anything, blogs tend to be much more honest and from the heart. Nonetheless, because they tend to attract an interactive community they tend to be a little less brutal than forums and other forms of Internet interaction. I have found that while tempers are likely to flair, on blogs people are much more likely to find common ground and say things like, “Yeah, I see your point”, or “I tend to look at that a little differently.”

We hope that you will enjoy reading and especially participating in Politics on the Brazos.