November 16, 2005

Beyond Crossfire

Langdon Winner gave a talk on the political sector of the blogosphere here at Maryland today. A substantial portion of his time was devoted to the echo chamber critique, that people go to their favorite pundits’ blogs mainly to have their opinions and biases confirmed, and that there’s really little in the way of authentic dialogue or argumentation or exchange in the political reaches of the blogosphere.

This feels wrong to me, or at least like a simplification.

What are examples of “political” blogs—by which I suppose I mean those that are overtly concerned with topical issues related to government affairs and national or foreign policy—where the level of discourse and exchange between opposing points of view routinely rises above that of Crossfire? If we can get a good list here I’ll send it along to him.

Posted by mgk at November 16, 2005 08:24 PM
Comments

It's not exactly a blog, but it does have a decent level of discourse with a lot of fact checking and sources.

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/groupee/forums/a/frm/f/28609695

I happen to post there, but I will leave my username to the imagination.

Posted by: Colm at November 16, 2005 10:12 PM | Link to Comment

Josh Marshall's TPM Cafe (http://www.tpmcafe.com/). Contributors are all on the left side of the table, as it were, but there's pretty informed back-and-forth and plenty of disagreement. The week-long discussions devoted to a single book have been thoughtful lately.

Posted by: dave at November 17, 2005 11:39 AM | Link to Comment

This is a tough question, but I think someone can be partisan (Josh Marshall is a good example) and still promote relatively open discussion. Eric Alterman's Altercation seems like a good example of this, as well.

Posted by: Chuck at November 17, 2005 02:27 PM | Link to Comment

I've been watching and working with things related to "e-democracy" since the late 70s. (I was using a military system in the early 70s that could reasonably be described as "computer-mediated communications".) I /cannot/ say that we've yet made good use of the potential.

My notion now is that we must strive for discourse. By so doing we will create techniques to counter flames and such.

Right now two things command my attention: 1) most people with strong opinions have few arguments to support their position, 2) people have an insatiable appetite for exchange.

I have a design ... I need to give rise to a Wikepedia-like entity to safeguard and promote it.

regards
ben

p.s. I found your blog searching for Redmond A. Simonsen.
p.s.2 my old project documents can be found in the WayBack machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20041012192138/http://is.dal.ca/~canid/gnodal/

Posted by: Ben Tremblay at November 27, 2005 02:23 PM | Link to Comment
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