Being an academic myself, I always find it amusing when scholars draw broad conclusions based on a narrow set of data. Take Michael Keren, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Communication, Culture and Civil Society at the University of Calgary. In his book, Blogosphere: The New Political Arena, according to the CBC, he concludes that “individuals who bare their souls in blogs are isolated and lonely, living in a virtual reality instead of forming real relationships or helping to change the world.” I particularly love this tag line from the publisher about Keren’s book:
“Michael Keren compares bloggers to terrorists, arguing that while the methods advocated by the two groups are obviously very different, they both represent a similar trend, one of diversion by respected but disenchanted citizens from the norms of civil society to a fantasy world in which the excessive use of words—or bombs—would make everybody listen.”
or, similarly, from the horse’s mouth…
“Bloggers think of themselves as rebels against mainstream society, but that rebellion is mostly confined to cyberspace, which makes blogging as melancholic and illusionary as Don Quixote tilting at windmills.”
You would imagine that such lofty conclusions would be based on one of the most extensive studies of political blogs ever conducted, right? Well, no. He followed 9 bloggers to reach his conclusions. As an academic myself, I think Keren’s work is just bad social science. From a methodology perspective, it is simply impossible to make such broad conclusions based on a such a small data set. But, you can’t make money with wishy-washy conclusions, right? Better go bold! There’s a good reason why this book isn’t published by an academic press…
Since Keren uses such anecdotal evidence to draw his conclusions, I’d like to come up with 9 bloggers who aren’t just writing about things they don’t like about the world, but are rather very active in political involvement.
So here’s a challenge to all readers: give me a list of 9 bloggers (Canadian or otherwise) who are actively involved in real-world political action. I will put together a top 9 (or 10) based on the most often mentioned. Leave your list here or free feel to email it to me if you don’t want it public.
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