I missed this great piece by Richard last week. (My own fault for relying on PoTB and IrishBlogs too much, remedied now by adding him to my blogroll.) It starts off talking about Barak Obama and the way poltics is discussed in the States and the way that the blogging community is quite healthy with political discourse.
I’m going to quote some chunks of text as I think they need highlighting. (Note: I use a lot of my blogposts as post-it notes to myself)
Other than Dermot Lacey and Indymedia, I don’t know of another blog(or disco board)/pol dialogue worth talking about in Ireland … it seems very unlikely indeed that there’s an analogy for the ‘dKos sphere’ here and its potential to influence a major decision – e.g. who should succeed De Bert.
Very true actually. But is this because Irish people are so unenthusiastic about politics and the way politics is played here? We really couldn’t be bothered.
I said to Disillusioned Lefty that the nature of Irish political thought and communication argues against blogs having a prominent role here (rather than being late adopters and/or issues of scale), but I’m willing to be proved spectacularly wrong.
Presently Richard is correct I would think. In the future maybe not, what can be done to prove Richard wrong in the future?
Look at Kos and then look at politics.ie or indymedia.ie or some of the fragmentary blogs with tiny audiences in this State and you see there are deep issues of quality, scale and influence. Ranting undergrads aren’t taken seriously anywhere in the world, nor should they be.
Nice bitchslap. True though. Even with Politics.ie and the Politics Board on boards.ie and a few other boards, there is not a lot of super heavy quality. OR maybe there is and we don’t notice it yet? PLUG: Nominate your fav political blog and post. While Richard goes on about Undergrads, would it not be good to introduce every politics student into the world of blogging. Have it as an assignment to maintain a blog?
There might be one way in which the Irish blogosphere might have a similar role, as a space in which narrative is teased out and unpacked. That is arguably happening in a sophisticated way in a couple of places here, though about foreign subjects. … But as of yet anyway it’s not happening in a meaningful way regarding Irish party politics itself.
So, again, how do we encourage the people and the ‘sphere to do it locally?
Irony of ironies, I wanted to reply to Richard but he appears not to have comments enabled on his blog. Just like me. Oooh, a fitting punishment for someone that does not enable comments on their blog is for them to be denied access to comments on others blogs. It would make me get off my lazy ass and fix comments here.
On a slightly similar note, myself and Dave were discussing the upcoming Irish General Election and that an unbiased and neutral fact-checking site is needed. Monitor all the hot-air that comes from politicos and see does it match what they said and what they did. This might be a way of reeling in those that may not have had an interest until now to get involved in political debate. Certainly would help make politics more transparent.