A parody of democracy ...or?

“The blogosphere, in short, is a reliable vehicle for the coagulation of opinion and the poisoning of debate. It is a fact of civic life that is changing how politics is conducted - overwhelmingly for the worse, and with no one accountable for the decline.” At least these are the words of Oliver Kamm, author of Anti-Totalitarianism: the Left-Wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy.

In his op/ed A parody of democracy in the Guardian this week Kamm writes:

“Blogs are providers not of news but of comment. This would be a good thing if blogs extended the range of available opinion in the public sphere. But they do not; paradoxically, they narrow it. This happens because blogs typically do not add to the available stock of commentary: they are purely parasitic on the stories and opinions that traditional media provide. If, say, Polly Toynbee or Nick Cohen did not exist, a significant part of the blogosphere (a grimly pretentious neologism) would have no purpose and nothing to react to.”

“The great innovation of web-based commentary is that readers may select minutely the material they are exposed to. The corollary is that they may filter out views they find uncongenial. This is a problem for a healthy democracy, which depends on a forum for competing views.”

“In its paucity of coverage and predictability of conclusions, the blogosphere provides a parody of democratic deliberation. But it gets worse. Politics, wrote the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, is a conversation, not an argument. The conversation bloggers have with their readers is more like an echo chamber, in which conclusions are pre-specified and targets selected. The outcome is horrifying. The intention of drawing readers into the conversation by means of a facility for adding comments results in an immense volume of abusive material directed - and recorded for posterity - at public figures.”

Interesting way to see it – Though, I must say that if blogs can encourage more people to become involved in a democratic “conversation” and change power structures by giving more people a voice, we have no reason to worry yet.

Daniel Finkelstein,Stephen Pollard and Norman Geras has also criticised Kamm for being wrong in his claims.