Sind Weblogs Monster? | Are Weblogs Monsters? - Part 3

posted by usha on 2005/01/26 18:35

[ Sind Weblogs Monster? | Are Weblogs Monsters? ]

Monstrous could weblogs very well be in another, more practical sense according to Ethan Zuckermann. In his article "Making Room for the Third World in the Second Superpower" ...
he asks often forgotten questions about New Media/Internet and democracy. Except from the fact that most of the Third World inhabitants lack the necessary tools for a broad(band) or even simple internet access, the excitement about multi-perspective and alternative views on world politics with the help of weblogs is going on. But, as Zuckerman states, "Alternative media is of limited help in this situation. Weblogs have proven their value more as filters than as sources of original reporting. (...) When journalists don't cover parts of the globe, webloggers are like an amplifier without a guitar - they have no signal to reinforce." He clearly misses reports from the Third World done by Third 'World inhabitants, not to speak of weblog filters from those countries.

Zuckerman makes a good, although old point there. Via reinforcing signals and reproducing and filtering special and often narrow spectered points of views it could easily happen that weblogs become the monstrous tool of arenas of exercising rhetoric: "Do the dynamics of weblogs favor better arguments, or just the more articulate speaker? Or perhaps just the speaker who has more cultural commonality with his or her audience?" The little weblog monsters thus share the disabilities of their older media brothers, or don't they?


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