[Air-L] Invitation - US Issues Forum - Deliberative Experiment

[Soon Wan Ting]

This is certainly a very interesting endeavour. In fact, blogging has come a long way in a very short time - evolving from a mere cathartic and narcissistic vehicle to one that has been touted to impact political governance and civic deliberation. My doctoral thesis adopts social movement theories (both classic and new, e.g. Tilly, Tarrow, Della Porter and Diani, Buechler, Castells) to look at political blogging in the context of Singapore, a small city-state known for the government's draconian measures in media regulation. An almost immediate response to a topic like mine would be gaffaws and incredulity, but some recent developments, not just limited to the US context, but also in Asia Pacific (think South Korea, Malaysia and Myanmar) allude to the possibility and potential for blogging to extend beyond the personal to the political. 

So far, the first stage of my study involved in-depth interviews with nine activist bloggers (in a nutshell they were involved in lobbying for greater de-regulation and holding press conferences with mainstream media to advance their cause) using collective identity constructs and theories. What emerges from the findings are what binds these bloggers together, in spite of their diverse pet political agenda and competition for readership, is a common political ideology and shared blogging practices (specifically, blogging using their real identity and using reason/objectivity as a strategy to reach out to their constituencies) that galvanize collective action and differentiate them from the out-group (i.e. personal and non-activist political bloggers). The interviews also uncovered variables that are key to classic social movement theories concerning factors that contribute to success in recruitment and mobilization in a movement, which I will be testing using other methodologies.

I would be interested to talk and get in touch with those who may be interested although I am not sure how much focus e-democracy.org dedicates to non-US studies. A side note, I joined this list serve a few months ago and have been encouraged by the type of collaboration and information sharing that goes on here.

Carol Soon
Doctoral candidate
Communications and New Media Programme
National University of Singapore



From: Steven Clift
Sent: Fri 5/1/2009 1:28 AM
To: PSRT-L at h-net.msu.edu; air-l at listserv.aoir.org; APPAM-L at list.s-3.com; APSA-CIVED at h-net.msu.edu
Subject: [Air-L] Invitation - US Issues Forum - Deliberative Experiment


The results thus far - online political discussions among people with
diverse views is are a vast waste of time.

Why? Political blog comments are mostly echo chambers that separate people
into reaffirming silos and online news comments are full of anonymous
diatribe.

E-Democracy.Org would like to engage interested academics and students in an
experiment to see if a few key rules/technologies can improve the quality of
discussions. We use real names, require civility (supported by facilitation,
rules, and possible member suspensions), and unique limited the frequency
one can post to once every 12 hours (on our local Issues Forums it is 2
every 24 hours). We created the world's first election information website
in 1994 and since then have focused our civic mission around hosting online
dialogue as a trusted neutral host.

For more information visit:

     http://forums.e-democracy.org/groups/us

Also, as we build our participatory audience, we are interested in having
public policy schools and individual academics share their work. Think of
our members as a roving book club looking to discuss the substance of
national policy issues not just punditry.

Feel free to pass this invitation on to others.

Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org
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