Blogs And Bloggers Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This example Blogs And Bloggers Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

The term blog is a contraction of the term Weblog, a page with numerous chunks of content arranged from newest to oldest. It is one of many forms of social media or networking available to people on the Internet since August 1998, which also includes Web forums, podcasts, YouTube, Facebook, and so on. A blog is found in what has come to be known as the blogosphere, a public sphere or space of opinions and discussions that is radically open to the voices of massive numbers of people. Thus a blog is any space on the Internet where one can voice opinions, thoughts, and ideas in a very open manner on any topic or subject matter. They are easily created and easily updated Web sites that allow an author or authors to publish instantly to a large audience from any Inter net connection. The term blog may be used as a noun or as a verb.

A blogger is a person who engages in the act of blogging, which is the act of writing opinions, thoughts, and ideas in any public space on the Internet. This involves making posts, replying to posts, and providing various audio and video links within a Weblog page.

As a result of the pervasiveness of blogging, several new terms have entered the lexicon including splog, a fake blog that has no substantive content, just spam (unsolicited commercial messages); splogsplosion, an explosion of spam e-mails; Twitter, a free social networking micro blogging service that allows the twitterer to send brief (140 character) notes to other Twitter members on the Internet and on other digital devices such as a cell phone; and vlog, a video-based or video-oriented blog.

Characteristics

Blogs are the fastest growing sites on the Internet during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Technorati, the leading blog tracking and searching site, has reported that as of December 2007 they have counted the existence of 112 million blogs, with 120,000 new blogs being created every day. Over the three-year period for which data is available, the growth was from nine million in 2005 to thirty-two million in 2006 to eighty million in 2007. There are believed to be 1.2 million postings per day, which amounts to seventeen per second. The major languages of the blogosphere are Chinese, English, Farsi, and Japanese.

Positive Aspects

The attention garnered by blogs and their sheer numbers signal their importance. Trend spotters listen to the “key conversations” among the informed and passionate writers and readers of these blogs. The viral aspect of the blog (the ease and speed at which posts zip around the Inter net) shows the potential for such a tool in politics as well as in business communications.

Bloggers are some of the most cutting-edge content creators online at the beginning of the twenty-first century because they state their opinions without fear. The power of the blog comes from the ability to allow individuals to express themselves worldwide almost instantly. It is indeed the cheapest, quickest, and easiest way to gain a Web presence. Through blogs ordinary people have the (1) opportunity to share knowledge and experience, (2) potential to educate and entertain, (3) ability to quickly disseminate news and information to a mass readership, and (4) possibility of generating revenue.

As bloggers recount everyday experiences and exchange advice on familiar problems, they often incorporate outside sources, linking to interesting stories from both online and offline publications. What takes place in blogs is not just personal journaling but also thinking and learning. Blogs present a broad range of varied and contradictory opinions and a wealth of information about topics from the minutia of life to global issues. Activists use blogging as a means of fostering political awareness, including blogathons wherein users can blog for a good cause and for various charity events.

Other proponents of blogs see it as a great format for delivering up-to-the-minute news on constantly updated pages across the World Wide Web. The community of bloggers acts as a cadre of fast fact-checkers that quickly root out fraudulent claims. Bloggers can be faster than traditional media when posting accounts of natural disasters, terrorist attacks, or how well American Idol participants performed.

Some believe that blogs increase cultural diversity by allowing a wide variety of opinions to propagate and decreasing barriers to cultural and political participation. Blogs have a tendency to reflect our common humanity by showing us that we can assert our individuality and yet we are not alone.

Negative Aspects

For all the good that blogs may provide, there are problems associated with their constant use. With the millions of conversations taking place, information overload is inevitable. How does one sort through the chatter to find relevant, substantive, and trustworthy conversations? Beyond the sheer number, issues regarding the nature of the quality, reliability, and finality of data and information obtained from these blogs raise important questions. Their credibility, objectivity, and representativeness also have been questioned. As a result, calls to create guidelines or rules for blogging have been made, but to many, this amounts to censorship.

Impact On Political Newsmaking

One of the major aspects of blogging deals with its impact on political news making. For example, on December 5, 2002, at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party Trent Lott said,

I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.

Because Thurmond had explicitly supported racial segregation in that presidential campaign, the statement was widely interpreted to mean that Lott also supported racial segregation. The comment, initially broadcast on C-SPAN, was largely ignored by the mainstream media. However, when political blogs picked up on it, the mainstream media followed suit, leading to Lott’s resignation from Republican Senate leadership.

Another example of blogs’ impact on the media is blog swarming—the relentless criticism of bloggers on an individual or group that causes a change in action by the individual or group. Former CBS anchor Dan Rather was said to have been stung by blog exposure over his use of forged documents in a report about President George W. Bush’s Air National Guard service, hastening Rather’s retirement. The negative buzz about Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers and her qualifications for the job caused her to withdraw her nomination. A blog swarm about the demonic-looking photo of Condoleeza Rice in USA Today in October 2005 caused the newspaper to remove the doctored photo.

Other Aspects

The world of the Internet is a ripe area for study, and attempts to harness it are often seen as a way of curtailing the entrepreneurial spirit. The legal system has had to develop rules for dealing with blogs—users must treat blog posts as business records that can be subpoenaed and, therefore, posts need to be saved, stored, and handed over to litigators in the event of legal action. However, the world of the blog to date is largely a free-for-all, with undefined rules and many players.

Bibliography:

Armstrong, Jerome, and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga. Crashing the Gate. White River Junction,Vt.: Chelsea Green, 2006.
Barlow, Aaron. The Rise of the Blogosphere. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2007.
Bausch, Paul, Matthew Haughey, and Meg Hourihan. We Blog. Indianapolis: Wiley, 2002.
Berkman, Robert. The Art of Strategic Listening. New York: Paramount Market, 2008.
Bruns, Axel. Blogs,Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.
Flynn, Nancy. Blog Rules: A Business Guide to Managing Policy, Public Relations, and Legal Issues. New York: American Management Association 2006.
Forrester, Duane, and Gavin Powell. How to Make Money with Your Blog. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008.
Kelly, Christopher. Two Bits. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008.
Richardson,Will. Blogs,Wikis, Podcasts. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Corwin, 2006.
“Social Web Sites Face Transparency Questions,” Winona Daily News, March 23, 2009.