Yesterday, while relaxing and reading the Sunday paper, I read an interesting Op-Ed piece in the Los Angeles Times. “Who listens to blogging heads?” by John Sides and Eric Lawrence is an interesting read, and addresses an issue that’s been bouncing around my head for some time now.

While computer ownership has increased over the years, and most people these days have e-mail, whether via work or home (My family’s a great example– my grandparents have an account, my parents, me, even the youngest grandkids…), not everyone uses the internet the same way. The blogosphere in general attracts and holds the attention of a fraction of computer users.

Now when you examine the blogosphere, it’s fractured into different areas, based on people’s interests. One of the blogs in my blogroll, Bellamoden, is primarily a knitting blog; occasionally, Bellamoden herself has written about tangential issues, including deafness, but 99.9% of her focus is on knitting, yarn, knitting, patterns, knitting… oh, there’s cats too. But it’s mostly about knitting (and did I say yarn? She’s building up a thriving hand-dyed yarn business).  She’s linked to tons of other knitting blogs, and her readers have their own knitting blogs. But I’ll bet you 90% of her readers don’t read deaf blogs, aren’t aware there’s a deaf blogosphere, and probably couldn’t care less.

The same is true for political blogs. As the piece points out, there’s tons of them, from Little Green Footballs to Daily Kos to Firedoglake to Instapundit. But as Sides and Lawrence point out, they’re pretty much little fiefdoms of their own. Here in the deaf blogosphere, I can count the number of political blogs on two hands: mine, Micah Brown’s, Michael McConnell’s (although these days, he’s morphed into something else completely… a champion of the decidedly tiny minority of oralist/oralist-leaning blogosphere), Rob over at Roblog, and a couple others. Joseph Rainmound used to discuss politics at Deaf in the City, but now he’s discussing English, education, bilingual issues, and ASL over at Many Tribes. Not so much politics these days…

Our readers/commenters aren’t that many; McConnell probably garnered the most, and even then, that number was miniscule compared to those that come to hear him hold court about his take on deafness, the deaf community, the deaf blogosphere, cochlear implants, and the like. Our corner of the deaf blogosphere is very small, indeed.

Now, going back to Sides and Lawrence: their overall premise is that the political blogosphere as a whole is balkanized; their major premise is based on partisanship. I agree to an extent. Where the best politically focused blogs are effective is when they do journalistic work. As Sides and Lawrence put it,

 If political blogs change opinions, they will more likely do so indirectly — by uncovering new information that is then amplified and discussed in media that reach a broader, and less partisan, cross section of the public.

Before he signed up with Salon, Glenn Greenwald was doing this kind of blogging– logical, thoughtful, well-researched and well-thought out pieces. Other bloggers and blog groups have done this as well. Firedoglake’s work on the Plame case comes to mind.

But one line of this article I found interesting. It’s this:

Indeed, some blogs put mobilization over persuasion.

Developing a political infrastructure will be one of the two-pronged legacies of the political blogosphere. The other is the previously mentioned dissemination of new facts to the Corporate Media and the public at large.

Other than that, a lot of these blogs, even the best ones, preach to the choir. As much as I want things to change, I’m only seeing that sentiment shared among a small, highly literate, highly politicized group of people. How do we effect change out in the real world?

I’ve often sometimes felt that way about this blog. It’s a way for me to share my thoughts, my frustrations, my concerns– but by and large, I think most of my readers are sympathetic to my views from the start. The same is true for the others. McConnell even has one reader who called herself his “groupie number one” on his last blog post (since then, he’s come out of hiatus).

Now, how does this relate to the deaf blogosphere? Simple: go back to that one-liner: “Indeed, some blogs put mobilization over persuasion.”

The deaf blogosphere is an echo chamber, a place where most of us are preaching to the choir. Thus far, I haven’t seen any evidence that outsiders are changing their minds, or that people’s opinions are being swayed. Most people have come with their own preconceived notions of how things are. All most of us are doing is maintaining the status quo.

Where we CAN motivate change is through mobilization. It may be time for those of us who blog to assess what we’re doing. Some of us blog because we want to share our lives and our thoughts with friends and family. Others are venting and speaking out (I fall into this category). Another group of bloggers are trying to educate people about their perspective on a variety of issues. Yet another set of bloggers actually want to instigate change. For those bloggers, mobilization needs to be the name of the game.

Now, a final thought: part of political blogging concerns the definition of political identity. That’s also what many deaf bloggers are doing online, whether deliberately or not: they’re defining a deaf communal identity. The recent firestorm surrounding DBC bothers me for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is how we appear to others. We’re willing to use questionable ethics (posting an entire IM conversation with real screennames, etc.), craft weak arguments (I think there’s a degree of truth to the charges of a “witch hunt” that some people contend is happening), and generally hurl nasty comments at each other. This isn’t our best moment, people. If you want to educate, persuade, and mobilize, then we’re going to have to be better than that. Right now, we’re preaching to the choir, listening only to other partisans, and generally not willing to conduct a thoughtful debate on the issues.

I hope that changes. While “Who listens to blogging heads?” is about online politics, the elements Sides and Lawrence raise are equally applicable to any aspect of the blogosphere. It’s an article we all should read, analyze, and learn from.

[Happy Bastille Day, by the way. If we want a revolution, whether it's against our political system or against the medical model or what have you, mobilization is the key.]