Tree of Knowledge

Over the past week I’ve been ploughing through my notes for my dissertation and trying to reconcile a body of academic literature on the blogosphere that presently lacks any real consensus on either the factual characteristics of the medium or on the normative implications of the medium.

A good example of this academic confusion is the work of Matthew Hindman. Curiously, Hindman has been able to combine some valuable new research data with some well-established existing data and come to exactly the opposite conclusion that I did (I’m glad to see that Axel Bruns over at Gatewatching has had the same experience when reading his work).

Let’s start with the valuable parts of Hindman’s work.

Hindman rightly identifies the power law distribution of both blog audiences and blog traffic that has been frequently observed in the networking theory literature on the blogosphere. However, Hindman goes a step further than previous research by complimenting this data with extensive survey research of A and B list bloggers personal characteristics. His findings are enlightening to say the least.

With respect to the A-list (the ten most visited political blogs):

“(The A-List) force us to reconsider claims that bloggers lack the training and norms of traditional journalists. In fact, five of these ten individuals—Marshall, Cox, Drum, Sullivan, and Hewitt are—are current or former professional journalists from traditional news organizations. (Hindman M. S., Forthcoming, p. 99)

“Yet perhaps the most striking characteristic of this group is its educational attainment. Of the top ten blogs, eight are run by people who have attended an elite institution of higher education—either an Ivy League school, or a school of similar caliber like Caltech or Stanford or the University of Chicago. Seven of the top ten are run by someone with a J.D. or a Ph.D.”. (Hindman M. S., Forthcoming, p. 100).

Similar patterns are observable in the B-List (the next 73 bloggers):

“The unmistakable conclusion is that almost all the bloggers in our sample are elites of one sort or another. More than two thirds were educational elites, holding either an advanced degree or having attended one of the nation’s most prestigious schools. A hugely disproportionate number of bloggers are lawyers or professors. Many are members of the “elite media” that the blogosphere so often criticizes.” (Hindman M. S., Forthcoming, p. 105).

Amusingly, Hindman goes on to note:

“Two-thirds of the op-ed columnists have attended at least one elite educational institution; 73 percent of bloggers fall into the same category. Slightly less than half of the columnists have either an advanced graduate degree or have done graduate study, in contrast to 70 percent of bloggers. Twenty percent of op-ed columnists have earned a doctorate; more than half of the bloggers have”. (Hindman M. S., Forthcoming, pp. 107-108).

“It is common for bloggers to question journalistic norms, and many bloggers believe themselves to be smarter than a typical journalist. Given the profusion of doctorates and Ivy-league degrees in the upper echelons of the blogosphere, it is possible that the bloggers are right”. (Hindman M. S., Forthcoming, pp. 103 - 104).

Hindman concludes from these findings that:

“In a general, bloggers are people who write for a living…… Running a successful political blog requires strong analytical training, an encyclopedic knowledge of politics, the technical skill necessary to set up and maintain a blog, and writing ability equal to that of a print journalist. It is not an accident that there are no factory workers or janitors in the upper ranks of the blogosphere. (Hindman M. S., Forthcoming, p. 105).”

I have to say, anecdotally, Hindman’s data on the characteristics of successful US bloggers looks to be largely replicated in Australia. If you look at the Oz Blogosphere, it’s difficult to name a prominent blogger who isn’t either an academic, a journalist or a lawyer (though compared to the US we seem to have proportionately more economists than lawyers and proportionately fewer journalists). Can anyone point to a major Oz blogger without a university degree? Without an advanced degree?

Back to Hindman. Unfortunately it’s in the analysis of this useful data where Hindman and I part company. Hindman combines this data with the power law distribution of blog audiences to claim that the blogosphere has had limited effect in democratising media participation. I think this is a bit of superficial argument, while it’s now pretty well undisputed that attention in the blogosphere is far from equally distributed, I’m not sure why this is a necessary precondition to democratisation. Surely the more relevant question is whether the method by which this attention is distributed is democratic or not.

As Axel has argued:

what determines this hierarchy of visibility in the blogosphere are in fact the linking and browsing patterns of all of us which are tracked by Google’s algorithms: rather than obscure editorial decisions behind closed doors at Google headquarters, it is the Internet population at large which determines what sites are and are not part of the ‘A-list’ of bloggers. Except for the obvious limitation that Internet access itself is unevenly distributed, I can’t think of many more democratic processes.

This isn’t a new argument. Variations of it have been made by Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky and others. Unfortunately, Hindman doesn’t seem to give much attention to these arguements and deals with them either superficially or through the construction of straw men.

Which is a shame, because as I say, I think the data he has collected is an extremely valuable contribution to the literature.

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