The impact of blogging on society and politics

The European Journalism Center invited me as a moderator of a working group on "The impact of blogging on society and politics" at the European Bloggers (Un)Conference, an event at the Picnic conference in Amsterdam.

It was good to be in Amsterdam and the organizers offered us a boat tour on the canals and the IJ river. I spoke with a lot of interesting people like Evgeny Morozov, a journalist which also happens to be the Berlin correspondent for The Brussels Journal; Dorien Aerts of publisher Concentra in Hasselt, Frank Janssen from Frankwatching and Miodrag Miljkovic, a journalist from the Serbian state television.

Our working group consisted of sixteen bloggers and journalists from eleven different countries: Armenia, Belarus, Belgium, France, Georgia, Japan, The Netherlands, Macedonia, Russia, Turkmenistan and the US.

The theme of the conference was "East Meets West", where "East" not only stands for Eastern Europe but also for Central Asia. Blogging can be very difficult in countries where there is no real freedom of expression.

Our group discussion lasted for two hours on Thursday, after which I summarized our main conclusions into a few slides. These were presented on Friday morning. You will find these slides at the bottom of this blogpost.

To summarize the main points:

1. In the UK, an Ipsos Mori poll found that only 16% of people trust journalists. It's not as much because of what they write, but also because what they don't write. While public broadcasters depend from politics for funding, commercial media depend from advertizing and profits. Because of their individual perspective, bloggers are seen as more independent and honest. Still, bloggers can learn some things from professional journalists in fields like writing style, clarity and efficiency.
2. Does this mean that bloggers have to be objective? Not at all. The new age is an age of opinion, not of facts. In order to be credible, honesty is more important than neutrality or objectivity.
3. Political campaigns are already changing into a more participatory way as a result of web 2.0 and blogs. However, this effect is still superficial and its impact on political programs is still low. Especially in the US we see that web 2.0 are effective for fundraising. But blogging and web 2.0 are not just about politics, it's about society. They are transforming society by giving a voice to individuals and groups. Ideas are now also flowing from the bottom to the top instead of exclusively top down.
4. In countries without free media, bloggers usually get in trouble only when they start to have a real impact. But for these bloggers it is difficult to get a real impact, as their blogs are not picked up by the mainstream media. Sometimes the impact can be indirect, through world opinion and foreign media. Check out globalvoicesonline.org for news about censorship and freedom of expression.
5. How can bloggers measure their impact? Counters and statistics only tell one part of the story. It's not the quantity that counts, but the quality of your readership. A few opinion makers as readers can have a greater impact than thousands of other readers. Surveys can be useful to discover who is reading your blog.