News blogs (Web logs dedicated to the dissemination of news) are becoming the default political news source for a growing number of well-educated and apparently well-informed segments of the population. Bloggers and blog advocates suggest that blogs, online lists, and their various analogs offer something different and potentially unique to the 21st-century citizen. At their best, blogs represent a new form of open-sourced/open-access partisan press that promises to bring McLuhan’s tribal context one step closer to fulfillment. At their worst, blogs represent the latest form of mass-mediated triviality and celebrity spectacle, with the potential to create and sustain insulated enclaves of intolerance predicated on little more than personal illusion, rumor, and politically motivated innuendo. Employing first a medium theoretic and then a symbolic interactionist lens, the present study considers some of the key structural features of news blogs and discusses some of the personal, social, and political significances of blogs and blogging.
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