Blogging As Praxis

“Revolution requires a transformation of human nature so that people are capable of democracy.” – Michael Hardt, Examined Life (2008)

Last week, commenter and contributor to Grad Student Madness, Rufus, offered the following comment to my post on the inherent and historical  craziness of our modern politics,

I agree completely with the signal to noise argument here. But I’m not entirely comfortable with equating blogging with political “engagement”. It’s certainly intellectual engagement (well, at least, on occasion); but political participation is embodied, isn’t it? Or is that so 20th century? I mean, going to the town council meeting and ranting for your allotted five minutes is clearly engagement. But does that mean that posting the same rant on liberals-suck dot com is also engagement in the political process? I don’t know.

A smart comment and a useful question, to be sure. Rufus was responding to the part of the post where I said,

With the increase in noise, you get an increase in signal that results in more information being available to more people  in a more engaging fashion than ever before. It only makes sense that the din which has always attended political sparring would get all the more rancorous given the necessity of those circumstances. And if the increase in polemics indicates, at very base, an increase in engagement of average individuals in matters political, even if I happen to find that engagement, like Jason, rather tiresome at times, I’ll take it. Democracy is a messy business and it runs on the fuel of participation. Sorting through the muck that results is, frankly, part of the job of caring and ultimately the more muck the greater the potential for those singular gestures of grace.

The “on the face of it” answer to Rufus’ query is to say, no, blogging and political engagement are not the same thing. Indeed, as I suggested in my rant-post on online voting,

Don’t me wrong, I’m a big fan of the Internet, which has provided me with a means of voicing my thoughts to a much wider audience than I would have ever dreamed possible only years prior. But the Internet itself, as a tool, hasn’t made me more civic-minded. Spending time reading about issues, considering those issues and how I feel about them, speaking with other people, cultivating a greater sense of my community, and considering the relationship between my sense of self and those identities that extend into the local, regional, national, and global spheres have made me passionate about politics and my civic life.

So I think there is a real need to be careful about seeing the virtual reality of online activity is an appropriate stand-in for good old fashioned civic engagement and I don’t think that cultivating such a skepticism is, as Rufus puts it, “so 20th century”, as much as it is critical in the twenty-first century. At the same time, and getting back to the meat of Rufus’ question, neither do I think that blogging/Facebooking/etc. have nothing to do with political engagement and civic responsibility. My weekend is a good example of how this is the case.

That anti-prorogation Facebook group that I wrote about last week — whose membership stood 38,000 on January 5 and now stands at more than 155,000 — has spawned a whole series of local groups who are organizing rallies in 31 cities across the country (plus one international group for Canadians in London who are upset with Harper’s decision) and over the weekend I attended the first planning meeting for the rally in Calgary along with eight of my fellow Calgarians. While it is true that these types of political and civic engagement existed long before the advent of Facebook and blogging, it is also true that with a less than two week horizon of time, I’m not sure that I ever would have come into contact with these like minded individuals and that we certainly wouldn’t be able to pool our collective resources to attempt to pull off a rally to express our concern over the current state of our government. It is also true that it would be much more difficult for the thirty other organizing groups to share information, ideas, and strategies, as well as keep abreast of what one another are doing and draw some modicum of strength and inspiration from one another.

It is in this regard that things like blogging and various social networking tools have some impact on the state of democracy and the vibrancy of our politics. As numerous people have noted, joining a Facebook group, on its own, isn’t much in terms of taking up the mantle of civic responsibility. But utilizing such groups in order to build a community who can then take their collective momentum “into the streets” as it were, in the way that me and my fellow Calgarians are planning over the next two weeks — there is a not insubstantial impact on our democratic institutions and lives there. It’s a phenomenon that is, I think, worth paying attention to.

Bring it back around to the Michael Hardt quote with which I lead off, to my mind good blogs, though certainly not all blogs, aim at creating much the same kind of community, though in some senses the nature of those communities is even more dispersed. But the interactions, even if confined to a virtual environment, need not be seen as inconsequential, at least not necessarily.

Someone recently told me that it is the quality of comments that pervade the League that really “makes” this site. I think that is a fair statement and, as has been mentioned in the past, we’ve worked really hard to set our comments section apart from your run-of-the-mill blog. We couldn’t have done anything without the quality of comments who have taken time our of their days and lives to leave a myriad of thoughtful and provocative offerings on any number of different posts, but such an outcome was our express desire and goal in the comments section here.

In short, we’ve aimed from the inception of this site almost one year ago to generate a community here — a community that is primarily interested and engaged in the exchange and exploration of ideas in a sincere, constructive, and I dare say generative fashion. We were looking to have the conversation that took place mean something, go places, and even occasionally change minds — if only every so often. The League of Ordinary Gentlemen is by no means the first place to aim at such goals, we truly stand on the shoulders of giants, but I think I speak for everyone involved in saying that we harbor a certain degree of pride over what we’ve been able to achieve in the time we’ve been operating.

The point, though, has nothing to do with this site, per se. It has more to do with looking at how we might bring ourselves to various mode of political engagement and what those modes offer in terms of a transformative process that can carry its effects out of our shared virtual environment and back into our everyday lives. It’s easy to go back and forth on the strengths and weaknesses of blogging and, at the end of the day, throw one’s hands up in the way that Jason Arvak did with his post about political blogging. That is a fair conclusion insofar as there are plenty of instances that exhibit about as much theoretical and rhetorical value as pissing into the wind. But the alternate point and what was animating my response to Jason that Rufus picked up on, is that this isn’t necessarily the case.

I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve learned something from my engagement in this site, and that comes from someone who is largely absent from the comments (though I read almost all of them). How I see the world has been transformed by my interactions on this site, my views have shifted, my analysis has been challenged and improved as a result, I have been exposed to perspectives I never would have previously encountered, and I’ve better familiarized myself with a host of  arguments and insights that have rounded out my worldview.

One step further, those experiences have, in many regards, fundamentally changed the way I interact with people in real space/time. Interactions that could have turned ugly, have been fruitful because I’ve been able to draw on interactions and insights I’ve had with various commenters/contributors. Conversations have gone much further and deeper than they would have otherwise because of the dearth of information that we bring into one anothers’ proximity from different corners of the country/continent/planet. And, perhaps most importantly, in our “bowling alone” societies, I have come to a place where I want to engage people because of what the engagement might yield.

This is a transformative process that has opened up a whole new way of doing politics for me that, in many regards, has resulted in a new appreciation for the diversity of democracy that one finds from rolling around in the mud. And while I’m reticent towards talking “human nature” — at best, I would want to pluralize the topic to make it about human natures — I am wholly with Hardt when he suggests that we must transform ourselves so that we are capable of democracy. Indeed, we must transform ourselves so that we are capable of wanting to be capable of democracy, with all its attendant idiosyncrasies, asymmetries,  frustrations, and imperfections.

My own experience has been that things like blogging and social networking, though they ought not to be confused with political engagement itself, bring to us a unique opportunity towards transforming ourselves into people who are capable of a political engagement that might stand a chance of flourishing in a twenty-first century context — a political engagement that is open, honest, divisive, appreciative, fierce, challenging, and ruthlessly transparent. In many regards, I look around and can’t deny seeing the seeds of that engagement taking root in virtual environments like the blogosphere and Facebook, perhaps precisely because those landscapes are so radically democratic themselves. And as such, I find myself disinclined to write them off as potentially useful (powerful?) praxis for participation in our democratic future.

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Tagged as: blogging, civic engagement, democracy, Facebook, Michael Hardt