This is key to understanding how blogs are changing political debate. Not only do they provide an easy and costless way for individuals to publish their views, but they allow them to engage in distributed arguments about those views, sometimes refining and revising them in the process. Debates in the blogosphere aren’t disinterested academic discourse, or anything like it. Serious arguments are mixed together with ad hominem attacks, insults, and irrelevancies. But political blogs are not meant to be a substitute for either journalism or academic debate. They are something new: a widely dispersed set of interlinked arguments about politics that responds with extraordinary rapidity to new events.
Exactly because the blogosphere involves clashes between strongly divergent opinions, it is beginning to affect other spheres of political debate. The blogosphere serves as a crucible in which politically useful and interesting interpretations of important issues are forged and tested. Bloggers’ ability to take up a new political issue, toss different interpretations back and forth among themselves, point out flaws, and arrive at final viewpoints makes them a highly valuable resource for political professionals and commentators in search of novel and salient ways of framing issues. It’s unsurprising that survey evidence suggests that a disproportionate number of journalists and politicians are regular blog readers.
