First rough draft — just gathering content.
(Click on the link to Spanking the Spokesman here for more of the draft and outline of this post.)
Be patient…..The intention is to flesh all of this out. The cartoon will get drawn and posted. Further elaboration will continue on the sense of “community” these blog sites claim to create and how they police that sense of community to maintain ideological conformity, the use of word limitations, name calling, banning and other techniques to enforce that conformity. Censorship and banning at Huckleberries, the VOX and across the S-R blogsphere will be analyzed. An additional technique to be looked at will be the manipulation of the “community” by the blog meister and his/her surrogates to churn the water and feed the frenzy prior to elections or on specific topics. (It is interesting to see that less than a week after the 11/06/07 elections, Huckleberries — aka HBO, Dave Oliveria, and DFO, etc — and other S-R blogs began tightening the screws, re-instating limits on blog lengths, designating “Trolls”, etc. Call it “culling the circle of community”. This culminated in a summit of blogmeisters and censors yesterday 11/13/07 at the S-R).
And then there is of course the issue of blog censorship and the developing business model for these dying newpapers. Another related matter would be looking at the tranformation of the relationship between owner, publisher, editor in chief , and editor of the “letters to the editor” page to a relationship between owner, publisher, editor in chief, and blog meister. These are two very different chains of interaction and involved the one way/one time commucation of the letters to the editor page and the ongoing interaction at the blog. What is the impact on free-speech? What is the social responsibility of the blogmeister? What happens if a newspaper creates a lineup of rightwing blogmeisters and employs are very heavy handed police on controlling citizen participation?
