# Posted 5:29 AM by Patrick Belton  

A FEW FIRST THOUGHTS ON THE CONVENTION OF THE BLOG: I'm excited that we'll have a role in covering the convention as a representative of the new media, and blogs in particular. The 2004 conventions will be remembered as the conventions of the blog; just like the 1952 Republican convention was the convention of the television, and the 1924 conventions were the conventions of the radio. Each symbolised the rise of a new technology to mediate between the political space of the public square and the personal, domestic space in people's living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchen counters. (We started OxBlog in April 2002; Glenn Reynolds began InstaPundit in August 2001, and the rush of widely read politics blogs followed then in his wake.)

Each of those forms of communication represented, and recreated, political events differently. What's different about blogs is the restoration of the human voice behind them, more in line with the Victorian newspaper, or Bagehot in today's Economist, but quite different from both the 'we' of today's editorial page and the unindividuated speech on page one. Today's newspapers reflect a positivist philosophy of knowledge of the 1950s and Karl Popper, when they attained their present form - each draws one authoritative representation of each political event. The blogosphere reflects the epistemology of the moment, Jürgen Habermas's intersubjectivity, where many individuals speak with each other and compare their different representations of the political event. I think the blogosphere fits in the same social moment as the new economy - it's decentralised, younger, quickly adaptable, and better describable by chaos theories of spontaneous order, than Weber's models of bureaucracy, which correspond to the career foreign correspondent services of the print newspapers.

Blogs are personal - there's a human voice behind them; you write as an humble 'i,' not as the powerful editorial 'we'. You engage in running, for the most part respectful conversations with other bloggers to your right and left, which might well be our day's running conversation of the republic. As a technology for representing politics and mediating between public and domestic space, blogs don't share the passivity of television, or the unspoken biases of print journalism, and because of these running conversations with other blogs - which as a blogger keep you honest, and continually questioning and reframing your assumptions. Something about blogging also forces you to be humble, because you write as an 'i' instead of as 'we', and you relate to people you cover as individuals, which induces respect and humility.

More importantly, though, all this pretentious babbling about German philosophers aside, I'm looking forward awfully much to meeting the other bloggers who will be there. Wonkette writes in that 'if we're lucky' she'll even join us for bloggers drinks. And I think it'll be fascinating to use blogging the convention as a way of getting around the televised spectacle which conventions have become, and looking for the relics of real politics that still exist there - through talking with and interviewing representatives of different factions and groups within the party, to see what's new in their orbits, what trends they think are important, and how the world looks from where they sit, as well as getting to talk to delegates from different parts of the country where I don't get to travel all that often. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion