We Happy Few, We Brand of Bothers

I was feeling nostalgic the other day. I took a little detour through my micropunditry past.

Something occurred to me which I'm going to blow completely out of proportion.

Bear with me.

Back about ten years ago, I exercised my inner pundit via email. I subscribed to a regional email listserver, "Minnesota Politics", sponsored by a group called "E-Democracy". E-Democracy's mission statement starts with its goal, "...Improving citizen participation in democracies and communities through the power of information and communication technologies and strategies.

Through collaborative efforts led by active citizens from across the political spectrum, our goals are to:

• Strengthen, expand, and diversify citizen engagement through effective and meaningful online discussions and two-way information exchange on public issues.
• 
  Increase the use and relevancy of democratic information resources that inform citizens about elections, governance, the media and public affairs and help us meet public challenges.
• Build and sustain the unique citizen-based "E-Democracy" model, so active citizens anywhere can join us and work to improve the outcomes of citizen participation in governance and public life in their communities and nations.

Sounds good, right?

Don't get me wrong - there are some very good people working with E-Democracy. But the notion of an institutional, hierarchical setup like E-Democracy, under which a hive of dutiful commenters will have orderly discourse on the issues of the day, seems tailor-made for people with more institutional frames of mind - in other words, people on the left.

And as I've related in this space before, the theoretical fair-to-middling idea has a lot of bugs in real life. E-Democracy has, in my opinion, attracted more than its fair share of petty little martinets as volunteer forum manager, who enjoy the "power" that running a list-server gives them to a rather unseemly extreme.

It should go without saying that the worst of these character are thoroughly biased as re politics. I stayed on the Minnesota Politics mailing lists from 1995 through the fall of 2003, although my interested decreased markedly after my blog started. I won the "most valuable poster" award in 2001 and 2002.

But it didn't take long to notice that while the forums were mostly peopled by DFLers and lots and lots of Greens, the lifespan of a conservative was very short. While many of the liberal commentators you read on the forum today have been there since the beginning (in 1994), the average life span of a conservative on the list was under a year; as far as I recall, I'm the only one that wrote on the forum much longer than a couple of years. Eventually, inevitably, I got "suspended" - for behavior that DFL commentators routinely got away with, and always had.

I was flipping through an old email file, though, and I noticed something; a lot of my favorite Minnesota conservative bloggers got their start on MNPOL: Wog from Wog's Blog, Swiftee from Pair O' Dice, Thorley Winston from Tacitus, American Mind stand-in Shawn Sarazin, and probably a few than I'm missing.

The parallels are obvious; squeezed out of a voice by the allegedly polite company who controlled the Hive Media, we had to find our own outlets. Blogs, for Twin Cities amateur conservative pundits as well as for conservatives nationwide, were the outlet the system denied us; in many ways, they're the poorer for having squeezed us out.

How? The mainstream media's problems are a matter of current market and ratings conversation. As to E-Democracy...

...well, look at how vibrant the discussion is. Or rather, is not. It's an idea whose time may or may not have come and gone - but whose forced homogeneity isn't helping one bit.

Posted by Mitch at February 25, 2005 06:41 PM | TrackBack