Howard Dean's campaign has blogged a lot, and used the Internet to build ranks of volunteers and raise funds. Dean fared poorly in Iowa, therefore the political significance of blogs is vastly overrated. So media skeptics of blogging were saying, up until tonight's New Hampshire primary. And while Dean's second-place finish will be spun at least three ways (dying; alive and well; and still too early to say), overall it won't do much to boost perceptions he's going anywhere but back home.

Nonetheless, Dean's problems don't say much about blogs, or the Internet. His lackluster performance is more about poor self-presentation and and a poorly-honed message than the tools he's been using.

Campaign sites and partisan weblogs are outcome-focused marketing tools. Independent blogs are much more, as Jack Balkin notes in his Jan. 25 blog commentary about a New York Times piece. The NYT item was, essentially, on what some call the "silo effect" of blogs, or "cyber-balkanization."

As the key examples of the trend toward cyberbalkanization on the Internet (I love that word, for obvious reasons) the article points to sites like Wesley Clark's website, Clark04.com, Meetup.com, and MoveOn.org. The problem with these sites, the article suggests is that people only want talk to people who think the way they do, and people who have different views are shunned.

That may well be the case, but these websites are being used for *political organizing* of like minded people, so this is to be expected. It does not prove the claim that online deliberation is rapidly becoming fractured and that "the Internet is in danger of narrowing the spectrum of debate." What it shows is that the Internet can be used for and is quite good at bringing like minded people together. And if you look at the way sites like Meetup.com and MoveOn.org are designed, you can see that they are designed for this purpose.

It certainly does not follow, however, that Internet sites do not promote discussion among people with different views, or that sites can't be designed to facilitate this purpose. I've already spoken about how weblogs facilitate exposure to a variety of sources in my previous posting. The argument the article is making is somewhat like saying that automobiles are bad for families because you can't seat more than two people in them comfortably, and then offering as your key examples sports cars. Sports cars are not designed for families; that's why we have station wagons.

I never really liked two-seater sports cars anyway. They seem too, well, exclusive.

As the seminal Clue Train Manifesto says, "markets are conversations." Ever more so in the marketplace of policy, politics and persuasion.

Now, thanks to tools such as Moveable Type, everyone who wants to be is a news editor, aggregator and commentator. Imagine the possibilities. It's mind-blogging, er, boggling.

Especially if you go outside your comfort zone.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at January 27, 2004 05:04 PM

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