I’ve noticed a lot of hype surrounding blogs these days. I guess they’d been hyped even when NNPCW started its blog, more than a year ago, but I don’t think they were a big deal back when I first heard of them in 2004.

I was still an intern for the office back then, and Gusti had charged me with coming up with a communications strategy. I went surfing the web in order to see what kinds of technology were generating the most buzz, and hit upon the Howard Dean presidential campaign website. Now, you can say what you want about Howard Dean, but his site was super-interactive. Since my goal was to make people actually want to come back to NNPCW’s site, I took several of the cutting edge ideas from that website and made them part of my communications plan. A blog was one of those strategies.

When we first started the blog a year ago, most of my elders here in PresbyLand had no clue what they were. Times, however, have changed since then. Mainstream media has picked up the scent, and now we hear all about the power of blogging to revitalize democratic media. And about those older Presbyterians—this morning while leading worship at the General Assembly Council meeting, several people mentioned how much they had appreciated yesterday’s post on Girls Gone Wild. Viola has been on board almost from the beginning. Shoot, even David’s parents started a family blog at Thanksgiving.

Yet how democratic is blogging? An article I read this morning talked about how the proliferation of blogs has made it increasingly difficult to have your voice stand out over the din. The blogsphere has developed an A-list of its own, those pundits you see on CNN who claim to speak for the blogging world. To get noticed today, one of these premier bloggers has to link to you. Unsurprisingly, especially when it comes to politics, these bloggers predominately consist of your stereotypical computer geek—young, financially well-off, white, and male. At the least they’re young for a change….

But if we’re assuming that blogs are the riotous pits of populist democracy that we’re led to think they are, then perhaps we’re fooling ourselves. Because although women and people of color are increasingly taking to the blogging trend, how are their voices going to be heard if no one reads their blogs? And how are they supposed to get an audience where everyone reads only the blogs they saw featured in Time?

Most of the A-listers tell you that blogging is a meritocracy—if your blog is good stuff, people are going to read it. True. But it seems that with alarming speed the world of blogs is developing an establishment of its own. And wasn’t it the original bloggers who claimed that the “establishment” television networks and newspapers shut their views out in the cold?

When we look at blogging as some new democratic force, we also have to remember that what we say here cannot speak for the majority of the world—a world where many can’t read our words, have never even seen a computer, where debating the nature of democracy and the role of technology is irrelevant to the daily struggle for existence. It seems kind of narcissistic and self-congratulating to assume that the blogs of the privileged few are going to revitalize worldwide democracy in the face of such extreme want.

I look at this reality, and I look at the A-list political blogs that are primarily about gaining political or social power. And in the midst of all these high-stakes power games, I wonder if they really get it at all.

“No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” --Matthew 6:24

Kelsey

PS—You may or may not have noticed that I have a longstanding policy of not linking to other blogs. Sometimes I wish I could—I would love to lift up the voices of many NNPCW members and alumnae broadcasting their thoughts out there. But mainly, I don’t do it because I’m limited by PC(USA) policy in terms of endorsing other sites and what might be contained therein. But that wouldn’t stop NNPCW members from forming their own sort of blog community, linking to one another so that you can all share thoughts and ideas together.