Is blogging killing democracy?
By Leon Sterling, Unfiltered 7-05-05
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With the announced retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor, a great many thoughts began swirling around my head. Mostly depressing thoughts. (I won’t depress you with them, though.) My mind drifted back to when I was just graduating high school in Los Angeles. It was precisely the same time that the anti-Vietnam war movement was seriously heating up. I remember the exhilarating excitement of word-of-mouth rallies springing up in just a day’s notice. And when you went to those rallies, there was a stunning sense of community – there were people just like you out there, lots and lots of them.
Today, there seem to be no rallies, no protest movements springing up and attracting both the attention of the media and the apathetic. Today we have the Internet. So messages instantly traverse the globe, but it doesn’t seem to matter.
Yesterday, I was sent a MoveOn.Org petition being sent to the senators of the signer’s state, urging said senators to make their constituent’s will known to the pres. If an e-mail falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it… Will ten thousand or ten million e-mails have the same effect as that many envelopes arriving at a politician’s office? Or that many people marching on The Mall?
I can’t imagine life without the Internet. More than 90% of the communication I have with clients and friends is via e-mail. I’m considering buying a smart-phone because I hate being away from my e-mail for more than 90 minutes since I know that that’s when a client will send me some urgent request. It’s worth spending the money on an upgrade to a Qwerty keyboard, Wi-Fi device just to have the peace of mind.
But all that said, I think those of us in the reputed “49%� category in the last election are doing all of our campaigning, complaining and commiserating via e-mail. The ultra-conservatives are also ultra-wealthy. So they have the means to make things happen from the comfort of their homes. We 49ers do not. The conservatives are already in action, and have already had national meetings on making their strong preferences known to the pres. (NY Times, July 3, 2005,
Conservative Groups Rally Against Gonzales as Justice.) We 49ers have not.
I heard a commentator on NPR one day (something “they� don’t listen to and are trying to kill) saying that e-mails are robbing us of our written history. Think of Ken Burns’ “Civil War.� Its mesmerizing power arose from the astonishing and captivating letters from the 1860s that were read during slow dissolves on Civil War period photos. Many a Master’s Thesis was completed thanks to the letters left by famous authors, artists and states-people. The NPR commentator’s point was that most of us now place all those thoughts and feelings (which were formerly written down in letters or journals) in digitized missives that are more frequently than not subjected to the “delete� function.
Our generation may be the first in thousands of years with little oral history. Newspapers, magazines and possibly even broadcasts will endure, but our stories, our thoughts about our times, may not. Blogs are not permanent records, either. Unless massive archiving is being done, they’re about as permanent as yesterday’s latté.
We’re now deeply attached to the digitized tools we use, and with which I’m writing this article, but we may not know the downside of that attachment for generations. Pre-Internet times required action. If you believed in something and wanted to do more than just nod your head in agreement, you had to go somewhere to make your beliefs known.
We need to put our beliefs into action again. And merely sending e-mails is the most passive, most nearly-apathetic way we could possibly do that. Blogs have only slightly more impact than e-mails, because only like-minded people read them. Whether it’s a conservative, liberal or in-between Blog, only those who think that way read them.
Something needs to change so that e-feelings leave the “virtual space� and re-connect with the real world.
Today, our beliefs are like fireflies – they shine for a few brief moments, but then they disappear, and no one knows where they went.
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Leon Sterling is an independent advertising, public relations and marketing communications writer/consultant now located in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He can be reached via e-mail at: lsterling@compellingconcepts.com
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Comments
One positive note for world peace...my daughter's class e-mailed back and forth frequently with its Chinese "pen-pal," enjoying swift communication that kept the interest level high and allowed the American kids a much deeper understanding of daily life for Chinese students. Impact? The girls in her class still remember it, three years later...
My concern is in the "ease-of-use" when serious matters are on the table - both for individuals and groups.
There are, of course, exceptions to the "black hole" rule of e-mails sent to politicians. While I was living in Connecticut, Congressman Christopher Shays (Fourth District) did indeed respond to an e-mail I sent. And he did indeed follow up on my concern of the time, which was documents via the U.S. mails.
I also have a friend who archives "everything," so he won't be one of those responsible for deleting any messages.
But who will know to get those e-mails from my friend, let alone what e-mails he may have. And who can prove what happens to the e-mails you and I send to politicians? The physical fact of a letter arriving in an envelope is hard to ignore, plus it's a federal offense to tamper with the mails. Not so with e-mail.
It's become clear that many of us "take action" via e-campaigns, and it has also become clear that they often don't "move the needle" a single hair.
The Sandra Day O'Connor issue is so dramatic because the addition of two conservative judges could overturn Roe v. Wade, along with the past forty years of progress for women and civil rights.
Thanks very much for taking the time to comment.