weblogs, democracy, and representation

[este ensayo corto es una pequeña partecita de mi tesis de maestría. estoy en las estapas finales de edición. creo que solo falta corregir errores gramaticales menores y encuadernarla para que la guarden en la biblioteca del departamento. aunque esto no resume en lo absoluto de qué trata mi proyecto, sí tiene que ver con la convicción política implícita en mi presencia en la blogósfera.

¿reacciones?]

the internet, photo archives and weblogs
The great cacophony of voices in the blogosphere
means that more views are being represented,
that more subjects are being examined in detail,
and that more sunlight shines into institutions of all kinds.
Jim Bacon

Everyday, new online diaries and journals, personal homepages, and non-professional photo archives make it to cyberspace. Mainstream discourse proposes that this phenomenon leads to a democratization of expression, since more people have access to a publishing medium that is not scrutinized by an editor or controlled by the economic interests of an institution. A common belief is that “anyone” can publish their writing on the internet.

In “Emergent Democracy”, Ito Joichi defines weblogs as “personal web sites with serial content posted in reverse chronological order”. He states that “traditional forms of representative democracy” are being challenged by the weblog culture. He argues that weblogs are an alternative to the power structures within the mainstream media because they are a form of information system that promotes the participation of more people in publishing and also the interaction with the readers. However, one must look at this statement with distrust. In order to be able to blog, the user most likely will own at least a personal computer with a high speed internet connection, a digital camera, technical skills to understand and master the mechanics of the medium, as well as enough free time to sit, type, and post thoughts online. Unfortunately, these are luxuries that filter and diminish the democratic potential of blogging. When doing the research for this project, I came across results that question this understanding that characterizes the technology of the weblogs as ideally participatory, democratic, and virtually free. By looking at the gender and racial distribution of the bloggers who published entries documenting their experience during the 2003 blackout in New York City, you could infer the “blogosphere” is still a space dominated by white males. Recently, there has been an increased interest in addressing these issues by some internet communities. Among the documents I found there was an invitation for the first gathering event and discussion group for “brown bloggers”, held on February 23rd, 2005. It was called “Color or Content: Does Race Matter when you blog?” Also in 2005, the first Blogher Conference was held in Santa Clara, California. The purpose of this conference was to address the question “where are the female bloggers?”, while providing a series of workshops and discussions to improve their skills and increase their knowledge about the medium.

As part of my project, I researched weblog entries published in the aftermath of the blackout of 2003. I read online journals and examined photo archives published by people who had experienced the blackout first hand. Of the 18 weblogs/photo archives related to the blackout, only three were kept by (white) females. Another two had been published by men with Asian last names, and one was written in Spanish by a young man from Spain who was vacationing in New York when the blackout occurred. None of their stories was directly related to my subject of research. Maybe in 2005, two years after the blackout, blog communities have diversified their ethnic and gendered proportions. Nonetheless, these results confirm the fact that the documents we have available about the 2003 blackout provide a picture that is limited to that of the white male experience.

In spite of this, it is important to note that many of the photos uploaded by these white male bloggers reveal a blackout experience with a very diverse ethnic configuration. Many photos were taken inside buses, in supermarkets, on the streets, of people stranded at the Port Authority, of people making lines to use a payphone or to buy water bottles on the sidewalk, etc. They provide a stock of public access images that show many aspects of a multicultural New York that were, indeed, not covered by the mainstream media (See Appendix C).