Tim Dunlop at the Evatt Foundation has written a really nice article on blogging. He describes the blogosphere as as “somewhere between an online academic seminar and Friday night at the pub.” Perfect if you ask me and I know you didn’t. This is definitely one of those get a coffee and sit down for a bit articles so get yourself comfy before you check it out.

Just the other day I was writing about the relationship between democracy and our expression through blogs. Tim is digging into this relationship when he writes:

For the individual blogger, or even for the reader who decides to leave a comment, there is a real blowtorch-to-the-belly aspect to blogging in that, by engaging in political debate in such a public way, people often move beyond their own knowledge horizon, or come up against people who are simply better informed than they are, or who have thought about the topic more deeply. Under such circumstances bloggers can be forced to do their growing up on a subject in public, which can be a difficult thing. But it is also good thing, and it gets us back to the idea, espoused most fully by conservative thinker Christopher Lasch, that argument precedes understanding and is central to democratic opinion formation. 

Lasch says that democracy requires argument and that public argument involving ordinary citizens has been usurped by an elite, a group of insiders who either because of political connections, expertise or other institutional reasons have easier access to the media and are therefore able to dominate public discourse. Such debate then tends to happen within pre-defined parameters that reflect the education, specialisation and norms of that elite. Thus, not only do they dominate public argument by virtue of their elite access and knowledge, they also tend to define the topics, terms and presentation of such debate and are liable to judge any lay contribution as illegitimate.

Yes! Of course Chomsky often discusses this. If you haven’t read him you should. I’d suggest starting with Manufacturing Consent.

The net affect is not only anti-democratic, in that democracy relies on public argument between all sectors of society, not just its elites, but the very idea of debate-as-learning gets turned on its head. Instead of seeing arguments as a source of knowledge, they become seen as a sign of lack of knowledge. This criticism is misplaced because as Lasch says, “our search for reliable information is itself guided by the questions that arise during arguments about a given course of action. It is only by subjecting our preferences and projects to the test of debate that we come to understand what we know and what we still need to learn. Until we have to defend our opinions in public, they remain opinions in Lippmann’s pejorative sense - half-formed convictions based on random impressions and unexamined assumptions. It is the act of articulating and defending our views that lifts them out of the category of ‘opinions,’ gives them shape and definition, and makes it possible for others to recognize them as a description of their own experience as well. In short, we come to know our own minds only by explaining ourselves to others.”

I could not agree more. Some of the best moments in my life have been the long discussions in coffee houses during which I’ve experienced those incredible moments of exchange and co-creation with my fellow humans. Dunlop suggests that bloggers are often too busy shouting and miss the chance to change minds, but that the process is, nonetheless, an opportunity for the sharing of knowledge. This kind of exchange, be it in a coffee house, street corner, or bloggsville, is a fundamental ingredient of the democratic process and the action of being a citizen. I think it’s in these kinds of moments, when we connect with our minds open and deal with our assumptions and our ignorance that we become something greater… we transcend.

The article evolves into an excellent discussion of the concept of “public intellectual” and the space that blogsville provides for an engaged discussion “where the ordinary citizen is no longer passive but can be a participant in the argument.” It’s in these discussions that the lines of expert, intellectual, and “lay citizen” become blurred and the process, or practice of being intellectual becomes the focus. It’s the action of thinking and discussing, engaging in public debate, that we deepen our role as citizens participating in, co-creating new understanding, new knowledge.

Dunlop goes on to tackle the subject of Truth with a big T and how 

blogging resurrects the idea of capital-T Truth, calling the bluff of postmodernists and reinstating it at the heart of public discussion. But it does this in a way that say Mannheim or even Kant would not recognise. Blogging reinstates a Kantian notion of truth, but it does so by grounding it in partisanship, not relegating it to the ostensible objective sidelines.

One interesting point in thinking about these categories and breaking them down which Dunlop never states: It’s not just about recognizing that citizens engage in the practice of intellectual thought, but that intellectuals are citizens as well. We’re talking about recognizing the categories but also about their potential breakdown in the process of engagement. Perhaps it would make sense to suggest that just as we are all humans, we are also all citizens at a base level. As citizens we should be in a constant state of uplifiting one another through the process of engaged citizenship in which knowledge is not used as power over, but is more horizontal and open to a broader range of human experience.

You might also want to check Tim’s blog, the road to surfdom.