Online Politics: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

caught in the moment
munching on  //  salmon
eargasm  //  the splashing of water from the pool & chi psi’s loud music
mood  //  jittery

I have observed that “groupthink” is a reoccurring trend in media, especially in the political sphere.  I viewed the video “Buying the War” by Bill Moyers last Thursday, and its central theme was how the government pushed their narrative about Saddam Hussian and the supposed weapons of mass destruction on reporters.  With government officials seen as official sources, reporters believed and adopted their views in their stories without fact-checking reports which were accessible online.  J. Patrick Coolican, the author of the article summed up the “glitch” by saying: “I’m pretty sure we do too much shorthand, guesswork “analysis,” which often amounts merely to repeating groupthink we’ve read or heard elsewhere”.

In Philip N. Howard’s article “Digitizing the Social Contract: Producing American Political culture in the Age of New Media”, talks about the differences in political communication between traditional & new media.  Howard believes “that the most interesting change in patterns of political communication is in the way political culture is produced, not in the way it is consumed.”  He then introduced several sites where grassroots movements & lobbyists could gather information to make their campaign more powerful.  During this “postmodern/hypermedia campaign” era, the Internet is a influential factor.  The advantages of the Internet which include cheap political ads, electronic forums where one can remain anonymous & an enormous digital catalogue of information that is easily accessible, compliment the non-Internet media because it is fast & efficient & the political elite have less control.  By analyzing these new media tools, he built two theories about the role of new media in the future: a theory about data shadows as a means of political representation & a theory of thin citizenship.

Questions

1) Why do political blogs & blogs in general lack photos and multimedia content? 

2) What are the advantages of having a separate wing of government to regulate the Internet & its content?