If you’ve read my previous post, you might have noticed that last paragraph in which I was hinting at the development that might bring back the balance in Democracy. You would have probably guessed that I was referring to blogs.

Yes, lowly blogs.

For those of you not following closely, blogs, for a while now, have ceased being an ‘online’ world phenomenon only.

Blogs came through an evolutionary process. In every step, Blogs started memestorms and dialogs within their milieu, and every step took that milieu and expanded it greatly, with the ballooning number of blogs bringing this new medium into more and more homes.

At first blogs were weblogs for online events/sites with feedback limited to these issues. They were also an English-speaking phenomenon almost exclusively. This changed rapidly.

The next step took blogs to commentary of the events of the offline world, with great memestorms brewing online without interaction with the world at large, a running commentary track for the ‘real’ world without the feedback getting back to affect it.

The latest step saw Blogs merging the online and offline worlds back into one. The dialogue is starting up between Mass Media and Blogs. Blogs are affecting the real world now and the effects are gaining by the hour.

In France it was discovered that some of the riots were being organized online, ignore for a second that some of the media coverage of that is Mass Media attempting to vilify the Blogosphere, but the effect that blogs are having is undeniable. Mark Russinovich’s blog entry uncovering the rootkit that Sony-BMG’s music CDs install on the PCs of unsuspecting customers caused a world-wide outrage. There are more examples every day, going back to when it started.

It is almost possible to place a finger on the point in time that Blogs started trying to affect the offline world– it was during the Democratic Party primaries. It failed at first, as evident from the results of that primary, but that was only the first step. I believe that Blogs were a key motivator to the record turn-out of youth voters during the last U.S. presidential election.

My point is that Blogs as a distributed media promise to bring back balance to democracy by creating a press (and I use the term loosely) in which fear is not so easily hyped and is not the immediate answer to every issue. While there may be some Blogs who will turn into mass-media corporations there will always be countless others who write for the sake of writing or for the quest for the truth and will not resist dissecting the issues to the core instead of falling into the fear=>ratings feedback loop.

Will Blogs fulfil this promise? We’ll have to see. I but I certainly hope so…

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