# Posted 10:13 AM by Patrick Belton  

THOUGHTS ON THE CONVENTION OF THE BLOG: 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 makes blogs different is the restoration of the human voice behind them, in line with the Victorian newspaper or Bagehot in today's Economist, quite different from the 'we' of today's editorial page and the unindividuated speech on page one. Today's newspapers reflect a positivist philosophy of knowledge coming from the 1950s and Karl Popper, when they attained their present form - each draws one authoritative representation of each political event, and exists in splendid isolation, ignoring the others like mildly distasteful neighbours. The blogosphere reflects the epistemology of the moment, Jurgen Habermas's intersubjectivity, where many individuals speak with each other and compare their different representations of the political event. The blogosphere also fits 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 better to the career foreign correspondent services of the print newspapers, themselves mirrored on that ideal type of bureaucracy, the Foreign Service.

Blogs are personal - there's a human voice behind them; bloggers write as an humble 'I,' not as the powerful, quasi-sovereign editorial 'we'. As a blogger, you engage in running, for the most part respectful conversations with other bloggers to your right and left, which might well turn out to be our age's running conversation of the republic. As a technology for representing politics and mediating between public and domestic space, blogs share neither television's passivity, nor print journalism's unspoken biases, and largely due to these running conversations with other blogs - which as a blogger keep you honest, and continually making explicit, questioning, defending, and reframing your assumptions. You also have the opportunity to place in the foreground many things that in print journalism ordinarily happen off the page - for instance, editors'-office discussions about whether to run a particular sentence, or unattributed source, or whether a particular elicitation of fact is misleading. In the blogosphere, those editors-office conversations take place in the running conversations between blogs, and are all visible to the reader, who's then given the opportunity to make up her own mind.

Which is, of course, rather more democratic; and that in turn gets us back to the conventions, and their place in history. Writing before the Democratic convention of 1924, The Nation speculated the coming campaign would mark a faddish cycle of broadcast journalism, but by 1928 politics would surely abandon the radiowaves to return to more sensible, solider stuff. The New Republic, more optimistic, speculated that radio might instead last for a few more campaign cycles. Broadcast journalism was here to stay, and so is internet journalism today. Eighty years afterward, bloggers such as OxBlog are looking forward to the Convention of the Blog to unveil to a broader audience an exciting new medium for politics, and to use it to get around the televised spectacle which conventions have become, and give some light to the remnants of real politics which still exist there. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion