Bloggers as Opinion Leaders in the Transformation of Israeli Politics

Milwaukee.
Wow, it's the last day of AoIR 2009 already... This morning I'm in the session on blogospheres, which begins with Carmel Vaisman. Her interest is in how bloggers influence political contexts, beyond the conventional and somewhat clichéd framing of bloggers as citizen journalists or political activists - what she wants to do, then, is to track blogging practices in order to understand what political impact they may have. This is in the context of the Israeli blogosphere in this case (and Carmel is a political blogger herself in Israel, and in that role has been in contact with political organisations who are building connections to the political blogosphere).

The case studies here are, first the municipal elections in Tel Aviv in 2008 - here, extreme-left politician Dov Khenin announced his candidacy for the mayorship of Tel Aviv, with an initial poll estimating his vote share at 8%. The mass media were busy delegitimising his candidacy because of his far-left policies, so instead of launching a media campaign, Khenin turned to the blogosphere and the streets to campaign, and especially approached a group of political bloggers including Carmel for support, who liked his policies and spread his agenda. As a result, he captured some 34% of the vote at the elections three months later - not a win, but a significant achievement (due in part to the bloggers' work, but also to his street campaigning, of course).

A couple of months later, in October 2008, a new political party, Green-Meymad (focussing on environmental and social issues), was formed for the national elections four months later; this party was treated as non-existent by the mass media, and not included in the mainstream opinion polls. The party launched a relatively ineffective media campaign only a few weeks before the election, when media attention was concentrated mainly on the Gaza war rather than on the elections, but had already turned to the blogosphere two months earlier and garnered good support here; it received a total of some 28,000 votes, and came very close to receiving enough support to enter the Knesset.

So, bloggers played a substantial part in these stories - but what did they do, and how? Their approach was hybrid and included journalistic work, activist work, party propaganda, as well as interpersonal persuasion through online dialogues - so there was media as well as communicative work performed here. Importantly, bloggers acted as opinion leaders, both as celebrity activists (activists with a public voice), and as early adaptors of public opinion (mobilising networked publics across hybrid spaces, diffusing what could be decribed as innovations in political allegiance) - and contrary to the mainstream media, who also championed particular candidates, they did so from a personal, individual position rather than an institutional one.

Perhaps the role of opinion leader today is a new, hybrid one in its own right, then - part activist, part knowledgeable expert, embedded in a networked public which extends across both online and offline spaces. As the operate in concert, these new opinion leaders can have substantial impacts on political processes.

Technorati : AoIR 2009, Dov Khenin, Israel, blogosphere, blogs, campaigning, opinion leaders, politics
Del.icio.us : AoIR 2009, Dov Khenin, Israel, blogosphere, blogs, campaigning, opinion leaders, politics