BLOGGING: VIRTUALLY DEMOCRATIC
Free internet connectivity in itself does not necessarily lead to social benefit if its only use is the sort of e-commerce typical of the late 1990s corporate web and today’s eBay. Importantly, however, new socially-interactive forms of internet media, such as web logs (blogs) and wikis, have become widely

popular communication tools alongside the ultimate ‘killer application’ of email. The new internet subculture that has erupted around ‘blogging’ is particularly deserving of analysis here, as bloggers have demonstrated themselves as technoactivists favoring not only democratic self-expression and networking, but also global media critique and journalistic sociopolitical intervention. Blogs are partly successful because they are relatively easy to create and maintain – even for non-technical web users.. If the world wide web was about forming a global network of interlocking, informative websites, blogs make the idea of a dynamic network of ongoing debate, dialogue and commentary central and so emphasize the interpretation and dissemination of alternative information to a heightened degree. While recent mainstream coverage of blogs tends to portray them as narcissistic domains for one’s own individual opinion, and center on conservative or neo-liberal individual bloggers, many group blogs exist, in which teams of contributors post and comment upon news stories, events, and issues of the day. One of the most important is the everexpanding series of international Indymedia (http://www. indymedia.com) sites, erected by activists for the public domain to inform one another both locally and globally. But even for the hundreds of thousands of purely individual blogs, forming groups of fellow blog readers and publishers is the norm, and blog posts tend to an overwhelming degree to reference (and link) social interaction amongst the group(s) proper. One result of bloggers’ fascination with networks of links has been the subcultural phenomenon known as ‘Google Bombing’. Documented in early2002, it was revealed that the popular search engine Google had a special affinity for blogs because of its tendency to favor highly-linked, recently updated web content in its site ranking system. With this in mind, bloggers began campaigns to get large numbers of fellow bloggers to post links to specific postings that were designed to include the desirable keywords that Google users might normally search. A successful Google Bomb, then, would rocket the initial blog that began the campaign up Google’s rankings to No. 1 for each and every one of those keywords – whether the blog itself had anything to do with them or not!
BY SANG IS/1221/14