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The Internets Encourage More Oversight


This article, that Agonist Editor Candy emailed me, in today's USA Today highlights some of the very real benefits blogs bring to the proverbial table. One thing blogs can do is what I call "hyperlocalization" which is taking a national issue, feeding it into the local blogosphere and having it come back out the national blogosphere-media complex amplified in a way the local news could never do it, with the focus and stamina the national media can never maintain. That's "hyperlocalization". And here's a perfect example from USA Today:

They're people like Mario Delgado, the publisher of Porkopolis, a Cincinnati-based blog that determined Ohio stands to gain nearly $34 million from 135 projects in the pending House appropriations bill that funds health, education and labor programs.

It's just not every day someone from Cincinatti gets USA Today to be their bullhorn. And this clearly cycles back to the local level and has an effect on the political calculations of all the locals, including the politicians. It's one thing to deliver pork to rich campaign contributors. But quite another to explain all that waste to your constituents. Hyperlocalization.

Good government types all over the country are doing this and the sites highlighted in the USA Today piece are just the beginning.


Sean Paul Kelley September 12, 2006 - 3:40pm
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Notice it's also neutering the Friday Document Dump?

Issues that resonate with enough bloggers enjoy what looks to be a secondary two-day-or-more cycle. Friday night's spaghetti sauce just starts tasting good by Sunday night. In a sense, it's actually counterproductive because it's anticipated; people sit waiting for it.

The Friday Afternoon Document Dump (or as the blogosphere terms it, the Friday Afternoon Outrage) may be effectively dying as a tactic.

So might be "Snow Them Under" - the amount of parallel processing available online makes huge data-dumps far less formidable than they used to be.

Everyone knows the old maxim "the internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it". But the internet is evolving with stunning rapidity; it seems the internet has decided to apply itself "outside of the box".

The internet of 2006 now sees information control, including that of non-Internet-transmitted information, as damage and routes around it.

Escher Sketch September 12, 2006 - 6:47pm
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I think this is great.

Direct citizen involvement in government - who would have thunk! We should expect a level of transparancy and accountability by those who govern. If they won't give it willingly to us we surely have a right(to fairly) look into it ourselves. The more the merrier. Maybe the internet really is replacing the townhall ;)


In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning. ~ Carl Sandburg

Tina September 13, 2006 - 3:17pm
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One of the things that makes the blogosphere

more than simply an alternative political tool, or "amateur brain surgery by committee" pop punditry, or dubious journalism, is the engine driving it.

The engine is not "the desire to commit journalism" or the "desire to commit politics". The engine is the technological enabling of "the desire to self-express" and secondarily the related "desire to be heard in that self-expression".

It accessed a vast well of untapped "I Am", and that genie simply won't ever fit back in the bottle again unless they shut the whole damned thing off - bandwidth-focused control methods can't address a movement that's fuelled and transmitted chiefly by simple HTML and ASCII any more than an Air Force alone can address a popular insurgency because it lacks the granular resolution.

And shutting it off would be commercial and corporate suicide. What was it Lenin said? Capitalists would sell him the rope to hang them with? Replace that with "corporatists".

Oh, and by the way, for a taste of what's really coming up in the future -

Direct citizen involvement in government ... maybe the internet really is replacing the townhall

Ask this - as the internet has no borders - citizen of where?

Escher Sketch September 13, 2006 - 4:13pm
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