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June 04, 2005
Blogging Killed The EU Star?I derided a BBC report naming bloggers as the villains in the French EU Treaty debacle a couple of days ago. I had to. I had a silly headline about the BBC being idiots I wanted to use. The proceedings smacked to most voters of politicians trying to pull a fast one on them. On the site etienne.chouard.free.fr, a Marseilles secondary-school teacher with a gift for crystalline prose and a weakness for silly pictographs--particularly :o)--convinced his countrymen almost single-handed that this was the case. (One of the revolutionary developments of the past campaign, largely thanks to Etienne Chouard, has been the rise of blogging in France.) "I haven't read the text and I simply don't have the time--too much work," Chouard wrote late in the campaign. But he warned that the mainstream media were ignoring the main stakes of the constitution. He laid out five of them:1. A constitution has to be readable to permit a popular vote; this text is unreadable. Damn. Quite a feather in that guy's cap. The medium really is the message here. It's not that bloggers are terribly gifted polemicists. Some are, most aren't. It's just that technology has reduced costs for the dissemination of information and opinion to zero. Which wouldn't be a big deal if the media (in all nations) were diverse. Then you'd just have further, amateurish opinions and news-hypers to choose from. But because media institutions tend to be monolithically partisan (always tending to the left, though what the "left" is varies country by country), suddenly having a zero-cost-of-entry Shadow Media can actually make a difference. Not because bloggers are saying things that no one else is, but for the exact opposite reason: because we're saying things that millions of other people are, only those people never get to register their voices in the establishment media. Or at least those opinions are given short shrift. A while ago I wrote: Europeans have a terrific system for managing politically-sensitive disputes: They ignore them. And, better still, they ignore the desires of those on one side of the issue entirely. What blogging -- the technology, really, not the actual bloggers -- offers is a massive speed-up of that cycle of elite dismissiveness, popular frustration, popular anger, and ultimately popular uprising and political change. This dovetails nicely with (appropriately enough) Instapundit's discussion of "preference cascades," and how tyrants fall: Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don't realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. If the secret police and the censors are doing their job, 99% of the populace can hate the regime and be ready to revolt against it - but no revolt will occur because no one realizes that everyone else feels the same way. An elite can rule against the wishes of the majority of the popuation only so long as the majority of the population doesn't realize it's actually the majority. So long as those who actually represent the true national consensus falsely believe they hold a minority or even "extremist" view -- a belief imposed on them by a monolithically partisan media -- they will not agitate for change nor express their true political wishes, for belief that such an effort would be futile. And possibly "extremist." An elite ruling against the wishes of a voting population is an inherently unsustainable situation. At some point --as with the Reagan Revolution of 1980 -- the house of cards must fall. But sometimes it may take quite a while indeed. Zero-entry-cost media -- blogging -- doesn't allow that false belief to persist as long as it once could. Again, not because bloggers are saying what the public doesn't already know; but because we're saying what the public damn well knows, but just isn't really sure enough other people know too. A zero-cost amateur blog in France helped fell a five-hundred page document that took millions of pounds/francs/marks and years to produce. Had easy and rapid connections between like-minded people not been possible, the "constitution" might have passed, simply for lack of public belief that they could actually successfully oppose it. Millions of people share similar beliefs but incorrectly believe, sometimes, they don't have the power to change things, because the national conversation, moderated by the establishment media, won't admit the possibility of change. But they're not moderating that conversation anymore. Or, rather, they're partly moderating it, but there are now some boorish voices catcalling from the cheap seats. And if France can be woken up partly due to a single blog run by a school teacher, who knows what country may be next? I had meant to ask Daniel Pipes when he was on the show with Karol and I: A lot of Muslims seem to subscribe to the anti-American, jihadist worldview. But to what extent is that a deeply-held actual belief, and to what extent is it parroted because Muslims believe it's the "Islamically correct" sort of thing to say? Could it be that many Muslims are actually not quite as fervent believers in Islamism as it sometimes seems, but are going along with what they think is the bandwagon? Would the Salem Witch Trials had happened had there been an underground media stating in no uncertain terms that all this "I saw Goodwife Smith dancing with the devil" was pure ass? Would a majority of the Salemites have realized it wasn't quite as dangerous as they imagined to stand up to the religious crazies burning people at the stakes, because they did in fact constitute a majority? So: what if there are actually quite a few Egyptians or Syrians or Yemenis who "support" Islamism largely because they believe most of their fellow Muslims do? What if free -- in both senses of the word -- communication technology begins letting Muslims know that they're not the only ones fed up with tyrants and constant hectoring and hate from self-styled holy warriors? Obligatory Natan Sharansky Mention Update: Strange Women Lying in Ponds comments: In his book, "The Case for Democracy," Natan Sharansky writes that there are three types of people in any "fear society" -- what he calls "true believers," "dissidents," and "double-thinkers." It is always reasonably simple to discern who the dissidents are, but it is nigh impossible, especially for an outsider, to discern the difference between the true believers and the double-thinkers. But his theory is that the vast majority of people in a fear society are double-thinkers, and will openly express their preference once they feel it's safe to do so. Without doubt most Muslim nations are "fear societies." We can't know yet the ratio of true believers to double-thinkers, but maybe an underground media can encourage the double-thinkers to stop double-thinking. | Recent Comments
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Calls for "Black Vigilantes" to Even the Score and (Get This) Riots After the Daniel Penny Verdict
"Person of Interest" In Health Care CEO Assassination Caught in Altoona, PA, Identified as Luigi Mangione, "Former Ivy League Student" NYT: He Carried a Manifesto Decrying Health Care Corporations' Greed Verdict: Daniel Penny Is Not Guilty of Anything Daniel Penny Found NOT GUILTY! THE MORNING RANT: Texas Republicans Defeat the Uniparty and Will Finally Elect a Conservative House Speaker Mid-Morning Art Thread The Morning Report — 12/9/24 Daily Tech News 9 December 2024 Sunday Overnight Open Thread (12/8/24) - Doof Gun Thread: Less Than Robust Content Edition! Search
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