Wellyopolis

August 9, 2006

Meta-blogging politics

As you may be aware Joe Lieberman lost the Connecticut Democratic Senate primary last night. The New York Times throws in this somewhat silly phrase about the election being a chance for "liberal bloggers to affect a major election, instead of merely commenting on politics in cyberspace."

It's a pity that the word "blog" sounds so different from "typing" or "chatting" or "communicating," because it makes it sound like the internet and its various manifestations are sorta different from actual real life. They're not. The internet in general lowers the costs of communicating to a geographically dispersed group who have other interests that bring them together. It's not at all surprising that people alter their behavior, sometimes substantially, in response to the dramatically lower costs of doing something they probably wanted to do before anyway.

Sticking with politics for the moment, perhaps this is news to the New York Times political reporters, but before the internet people interested in politics got together in bars and coffee shops and people's houses and shot the breeze about politics and how to take over the world. Now, this kind of thing is great, but here's the thing. Getting lots of people together in one place at one time has substantial co-ordination costs. It's OK if there's just two of you, but once the numbers start climbing, you try and find a time that works for all of the people all of the time ... It also has not insignificant transportation costs. Really, should the New York Times be surprised that people in the Connecticut suburbs don't want to drive to political meetings on their crowded, narrow roads when they could organize over the internet?

This rather simple "insight" applies to lots of other activities where the internet has become important in communicating things that might previously have been done in person. It would be great if I could find a time to meet up with people 4 days a week and run with them, and share my random, possibly dodgy, views on their training, but again ... time, distance, etc ... and we're only 25 minutes drive apart (on a quiet Saturday morning).

It's much less exciting to see blogs as merely low cost, wide-distribution, interactive, pamphlets but that's all they are.

(See also Yglesias)

Posted by eroberts at August 9, 2006 10:18 AM