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I just got back from the Voting with a Mouse: How Bloggers Altered the Political Landscape event at the Humphrey Center.

The forum began with a Power Point from David Carr of the New York times. Karr used to write for various publications and alterative weeklies here in Minnesota.

Following the presentation Joe Bodell of MNCR, Michael Brodkorb of MDE, Eric Black of the Strib/Big Question and Carr held an interesting and informative panel.

The panel spent a large amount of time debating whether or not blogs worsen the partisan divides in society or merely reflect the fault lines that already exist.

Carr and Black argued that since blogs allow the reader to only associate with others that confirm and reinforce his own biases, blogs exacerbate partisan differences. The worry here was that the blogosphere would merely become the electronic equivalent of talk radio.

Despite their own partisan differences, Bodell and Brodkorb united in opposition to this argument. While conceding that individual blogs may amplify voices in the ideological extremities the blogosphere in total does reflect society.

I’ll post more discussion and some of my own impressions tomorrow in Part 2. Teaser: Part 3 is entitled “The End of Privacy”.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 4:58 pm and is filed under Media, Star Tribune. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.