The Politics of Blogging

~ Laura

I just sent over the final draft of my paper on blogging over to my co-author for review, and now I’m free to return to the blogosphere.

For the past several months, I have plugging away with my friend and co-author, Toni Pole, on a paper on the politics of blogging for the American Political Science Conference which will be in two weeks in Chicago. Our panel should be great fun. In addition to myself and Toni, Dan Drezner and Henry Farrell will be presenting their own paper on how blogging influences the media. Their paper should be a great complement to our own which looks at a different angle of blogging. We were interested in the political dialogue that results from blogging between other bloggers and their readers. Is blogging a new form of political participation, similar to attending a political rally or signing a petition? We found that it was. Bloggers link obsessively to each other within posts and on their blogrolls. Most had comments sections which allowed for further dialogue. And there was some movement by bloggers to more directly influence politics by encouraging their readers to vote, to contact an elected official, to attend rallies, to contribute to a political campaign, etc… I’ll have a link up in a couple of weeks, so that everyone can take a look at the paper and give us feedback.

And since my last name will no longer be a secret, let me post it here first. It’s McKenna.

In addition to our papers, the panel will also feature commentary by other esteemed bloggers, Ana Marie Cox of Wonkette, Mark Kleiman, and Andrew Sullivan. Cass Sunstein will be the voice of reason as the discussant of the panel. And there will be sure to be other bloggers in the audience, as well.

UPDATE: Dan has a post today on how the White House staff are blog fans.

Published by Laura

4 thoughts on “The Politics of Blogging”

  1. Looking forward to seeing it!
    BTW, I don’t know if you were aware of this, but your last name already shows up in the “From” field of your RSS feed. But I guess you probably don’t need to change that now.

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  2. I’ll be there! But I admit I got confused last time I checked the APSA schedule; it seemed to me that you were presenting a paper on another panel at the same time. I must have read things wrong. Anyway, we really ought to try to organize some sort of meta-blogger get-together after the panel; with any luck, besides you and Dan, Mark, Andrew, and Henry, maybe Jacob (Levy), Harry (Brighouse), Chris (Lawrence) and a bunch of other polisci bloggers will show up. Should be fun.

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  3. re: the APSA program. Yeah, I know I’m listed under two other panels and not this one. I had to back out of a paper on women’s politics because it was scheduled for the same time as this one. I wasn’t on the original proposal for the paper, so APSA wasn’t aware of the conflict and also didn’t put me in the PS program. It’s okay. I’ll be there.
    It will be great fun to meet everyone face to face, won’t it. Let’s talk later about a get together.

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  4. Laura: FWIW, I think you were already “outed” in the acknowledgements of Dan and Henry’s paper a few weeks ago.
    Anyway, unless some incredibly desperate institution of higher learning wants to interview me at the same time, I’ll be there.

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