Blogging America, Aaron Barlow’s second book about the 21st century phenomenon of blogging, revisits the territory of his first, the seminal The Rise of the Blogosphere. As Barlow establishes in that first book, pamphlets and broadsides, written under pseudonyms and sponsored by interested parties, were the agents of conversation long before the latter half of the 20th century’s insistence on the so-called objective presentation of news.

This second book zeroes in on blogs themselves and how, at a very detailed and specific level, they are transforming our cultural landscape, creating, as his title suggests, a new public sphere. For those concerned about the future of democracy, the existence of such a civic space may be our last bulwark against neo-liberalism “disappearing” open discussion.

Indeed, a vibrant civic space is critical as a defense against the new millennium’s robber barons as it was to our Common Sense reading forbearers as they held off the British Redcoats.

Think I am being harsh? Neo-liberalism, in the words of its founders, is dedicated to “eliminating the public sphere, total liberation for corporations, and skeletal social spending” ¹ -- all of which add up to a fettered press.

To be blunt: ideologically pure neo-liberalism (what we in this country call free-market economy) is not compatible with democracy.

A pure neo-liberal economy can only prevail when all “contamination” is eliminated. According to Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine, in order to remove any tainting economic policies in their early “experiments,” the free-marketers Friedman and his Chicago Boys aligned themselves with a long list of repressive governments (from Pinochet’s Chile to the military juntas in Argentina and Brazil) which infamously stomped out any pesky dissenting voices. ²

And so, a messy, free, chaotic public sphere that reports, discusses, digests, and disseminates information – a clamoring of more than 75 million blogs [35] -- is perhaps the best vaccine and antidote against such repression in an increasingly corporatized America.

The Philosophical Underpinnings:

Barlow begins his analysis of the messy world of blogging through the lens of three 20th century scholars: Jurgen Habermas, B.F. Skinner, and Walter Ong [2]. He relies on Habermas for perspective on the public sphere; on Skinner for dissection of the verbal behavior of the blogger (as Barlow postulates, Skinner might say: “We learn to blog to be understood.” [17]), and on Ong for analysis of the development of language, from pre-Gutenberg times to the eve of the current communications revolution, focusing in interactions of technology, culture and language [19].

For those unused to reading philosophy or critical theory, this first chapter may be the slowest in a book which otherwise reads like a lively blog post with chattering interjections from the real world of bloggers.

In the rest of the book, we are shoulder to shoulder with bloggers in their worlds, their motivations, their communities, their power, and the “taboos and rules of net-decorum of their sites.” Barlow begins each chapter with a list of blogs, complete with urls, of those under discussion. He closes the book with a blogroll.

Along the way, Barlow attacks head on the common criticisms of blogs and citizen journalism efforts. In Chapter 2, "Blogs in Society," he debunks Andrew Keen’s lament that blogs are literally a cult of the amateur and thus debase the quality of news and information available online.

Barlow argues the very opposite: As a society we are becoming more “neterate,” able to “sift noise from information” [35] and indeed, several blogs and citizen news sites have established standards for fact-checking, editing, and verifying… as well as codes of conduct.

Barlow quickly illustrates that Keen advocates for a Gatekeeper who can keep out the Hordes. The superior One to the lesser Many, of course, is the model of a dictator’s censorship of news and thought. ³

Barlow also addresses the common criticism that blogs rarely provide original or new information and instead merely rehash the work done by the so-called professionals. Barlow rightly points out that such criticism misses the essence of blogs: conversation. Such criticism sees blogs merely as product, not process. Yet, it is blog conversation that helps create the inherent value for the participants [50].

Our American heritage, of course, teaches us to value the open exchange of ideas, for we know that repressive governments shut down meetings, criminalize participants, and eliminate open discussion, because, of course, communication informs and empowers the oppressed.

After dispensing with the critics, Barlow takes us into the middle of these bloggers‘ passionate dedication to freedom and community. Through the blog posts at Digg, we learn of the power of the blogstorm to maintain freedom of information in the face of a corporation’s threatening litigation [64]. Through blog diaries and private emails with blogger RenaRF, we see up close the power of a blogging community harnessed to activism.

As Barlow notes: “the area of community is where the blogs do finally prove to have their greatest impact and originality” [61]. He enlarges our understanding of community and conversation by using Karl Popper and the sociology of knowledge as well as Dewey and the power of association -- the building of community and moving from the I-Mine to the We-Ours. Or, as a commenter on the blog DailyKos wrote: “We are essential, just no more essential than the next person."

Throughout, Barlow extends these themes by his examination of blogs in the political arena and in pop culture, culminating in his final chapter at how religious blogs, specifically Christian blogs, are more than  “church newsletters.”  They are often vibrant communities of open discussion.

Confessions:

At this point I must confess to some prejudice – as I have known Aaron Barlow now for over three years. Our friendship was initiated in a blind telephone conversation in March of 2005 – both of us having answered a call from a blogger named Georgia10 for help with a new effort. The effort would eventually become ePluribus Media, initiated to fill the vacuum that we felt the corporate media had created as it abdicated its responsibility for gathering and disseminating credible news.

Specifically, the corporate media, including the giants of the Washington Post and The New York Times, had failed to police their own.⁴ The energizing event was the presence of one Jeff Gannon at the President’s Press briefings – an unknown who was often called upon and conveniently asked President Bush softball questions. So who was this guy and what was the news outfit he worked for? ⁵ In the spirit of the old-fashioned founding fathers, a bunch of bloggers dug into public records to discover that James Gannon aka Jim Guckert had fewer journalism credentials than many of us. His “news company”? A one or two-person website cobbled together by a Texas GOP operative.

Much, therefore, of what Barlow covers in his book, I have lived through. Reading through these pages was like revisiting old friends. Barlow’s description, for example, of the pioneering citizen journalism blog iBrattleboro, started in 2001 by the owners of MuseArts, charmed me, just as Chris Grotke and Lise LePage charmed me when I met them during their stint organizing the first “citizen journalism” track at the Media Giraffe conference in 2006. ⁶

I was especially delighted by Barlow’s description of the often unheralded blogger Avahome and her January 2007 email to two ePluribus Media colleagues about something “sticking in her craw” regarding the early reports of a couple of U.S. Attorneys resigning… in what New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias would later call the “Pearl Harbor Day Massacre.” [113] ePluribus Media, of course, went on to write over 30 stories about the US Attorney firings, the politicization not only of the investigations initiated by Department of Justice, but the politicization of the very staffs dedicated to preserving our voting rights.

And Barlow’s email interview with blogger RenaRF about her public call to bloggers to move from behind their computer chattering to become active and engaged in the real world –  that email correspondence struck a chord with me, not just because RenaRF had represented ePluribus Media during Representative Conyers hearings into the U.S. Attorneys firings, but because I too occasionally feel that bloggers need to, in the words of Paul Wellstone, “stand up.” Or more crassly, as a business associate of mine once admonished: “Talk is cheap. Quit talking and start doing.”

Never has this been more important than now, as the pursuit of nothing but profit diminishes light after light in our once free press.

Discuss this article.

Blogging America: The New Public Sphere.
by Aaron Barlow.
Praeger, 2008.
ISBN-13:978-0-275-99872-1

Notes

¹ Naomi Klein. The Shock Doctrine. New York: Picador, 2007, page 18. This book should be required reading for every American holding citizenship.

² For what is one candidate for an almost ideologically pure neo-liberal state – consider Burma

³ Barlow was so incensed by the elitism exhibited by Andrew Keen, that he wrote an entire review of the Cult of the Amateur.

⁴ The one notable exception was in 2002, the Knight Ridder (later McClatchy) Washington Bureau. John Wolcott, the Bureau Chief, was recently awarded Harvard University Nieman Foundation for Journalism’s I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence. Along with Wolcott, two others -- Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel – “produced dozens of stories that questioned the Bush administration's claims about the need for war and exposed the serious reservations that many intelligence, Foreign Service and military officers had about the rush to invade Iraq.”

⁵ The original Gannon diaries were first published at DailyKos, later archived at ePluribus Media once it self-organized and created the four sites that make up its presence today, the ePluribus Media Journal, Community, Timelines and Investigations.

⁶ The IBrattleboro Wizards An interview with Chris Grotke and Lise LePage.

About the reviewer

Cho is a member of the ePluribus Media Board of Directors as well as an editor for the ePluribus Media Journal. She is a Columbia School of Journalism Sulzberger Fellow and has written and collaborated on numerous ePluribus Media Journal stories and research.