Blogging

Blogging is a term that refers to the act of posting entries on a blog. Blogs are personal or organizational websites that allow their authors to publish texts and multimedia materials online without the intervention of an editor or a webmaster. Blogging entails an active or activist use of the Internet, in which a passive mass of users becomes an active and responsive public. Through a structure marked by personal opinion rhetoric, and many times a firsthand reporting style, blogging represents a community of Internet users who produce their own coverage of current events in order to contest the monopoly of information distribution by mainstream media corporations.

By securing a versatile technology, apt for users' continual posting, web developers opened up the possibility for cyberspace to turn into a blogosphere, a networked environment of blogs that functions as an open forum for public debate. The architecture that facilitates this virtual blogging community is basically made out of hyperlinks. They connect diverse perspectives on a certain topic by highlighting the threads within a given conversation of posts in response to previous posts.

Specialists agree that in the United States after 9/11, blogs became increasingly influential in generating public opinion and collective response. In the context of George W. Bush's war on terror campaign, people turned to the web as a channel to support or to oppose the government's policies regarding issues such as homeland security and terrorism. Blogging also became a privileged ground for firsthand reporting from the areas of conflict in order to point to the horrors of the actually “lived” state of war.

Blogs played an influential part in the 2004 U.S. presidential elections. Democratic candidate Howard Dean was one of the main political figures to use this medium to install his image in the public scene. By that time, blogs had become a self-sustained space for electoral campaigning and political scrutiny.

In countries subjected to a heightened state of surveillance and censorship, blogs help citizens to get their reports out for fellow bloggers to spread the word about human rights abuses. Unfortunately, this approach to blogging as a tool that bypasses the regulations imposed by hegemonic authority has its limits. Reports indicate that in compliance with authoritarian governments, or perhaps obliged by them, Internet providers police these websites and shut them down when they find information denouncing the government's performance.

As specialists in the field note, effective blogging means not only a seizing of the means of production by writers but also the possibility of reaching a massive audience. More and more, this is ensured by the networked community, who digs in the corners of the blogosphere to reach out to those who need to be heard.