Well, the next instalment of our Club Bloggery series for ABC Online has now been published. On the Gatewatching blog which Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders and I run, we've posted a slightly earlier, longer version of the piece, which asks quite simply what we know about the real impact of blogging on political debate in Australia, beyond the realm of those already addicted to the machinations of the political scene...
Blogging outside the Echo Chamber
By Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, and Barry Saunders
In the current political climate, it's no surprise that a number of sessions at the recent Australian Blogging Conference at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane focussed on the potential for blogs and other citizen journalism sites to impact on political news and punditry. In a previous article, we've already noted the continuing skirmishes between psephologist bloggers and the political commentators, whose rather unscientific interpretation of opinion poll results that some bloggers have challenged fervently.
It is tempting to claim that the growing recognition of Australian bloggers and citizen journalists as alternative sources of news and commentary is a sign that they're storming the gates of the mainstream media. Many of the comments on our earlier piece seem to support that view - as one reader wrote, "I believe that Possum [Pollytics] and Bryan at Ozpolitics.info have given me more honest and concise information about this year's political climate than all of the other media websites put together."
How representative are such voices, though? If the journalistic commentariat in the Canberra press gallery is sometimes accused of constituting an echo chamber - talking, writing, broadcasting mainly to itself and the rest of the political class, but with little significant impact on the wider citizenry - then is breaking into those circuits of discourse anything more than a pyrrhic victory; are the bloggers anything more than a bunch of politics nerds gatecrashing a party of fellow nerds? Put simply, do these blogs matter to the rest of the electorate?
