Morning!
I'm just wondering what kind of political impact you think blogs and online media are having on politics in Australia in general.
Are they encouraging political engagement, or it is only a media savvy minority who use them as an alternative to mainstream media?
Are they even a legitimate source of information?
I would be interested to hear your thoughts or find links to any info you have come across.

I think politicians are using blogs as sounding boards for their ideas. Sometimes you hear politicians repeat phrases or ideas that you first heard on OnlineOpinion. I think we are being used as a kind of focus group to road test ideas. And we have seen politicians do back flips when they are way out of line with public opinion

Mark Bahnisch http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4721 thinks that there’s a revolution under way – new media are mobilising political involvement. As well he should, since he started Larvatus Prodeo http://larvatusprodeo.net/, a political blog.

I reckon that if anything, he’s understating this change. First, the new media are giving us access to news and opinion items that simply don’t make it into mainstream media: see http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/06/16/1023864377517.html

Second, as we see here on OLO, the internet has given voice to legions of hitherto silent folk, many of whom only recently learned to switch on a computer. Here, anyone who cares to can speak to an audience of 4,000-odd registered OLO users, plus the unknown number who visit without signing in.

Third, the new media are connecting like-minded individuals across the country, who in turn are able to gather and influence their elected representatives en masse. GetUp http://www.getup.org is a fairly wide-ranging example. Less interactive, but quite influential, is the Australian Christian Lobby, which uses its website http://www.acl.org.au/ as a platform for political action. Now at 1.3 million hits, Rodney Croome’s gay activism blog http://www.rodneycroome.id.au/weblog punches well above its weight as a one-man operation. It probably doesn’t get more specialised than the Kidney Blog, http://www.kidney.org.au/blog/, which aims to raise community awareness about kidney donation, and dialysis.

Where’s this all leading? Hard to say. However I reckon that these tools will increase the pressure for more direct democracy, http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=17#256

As a result, we need to get moving on protections from derailed democracy – notably a Bill of Rights: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=483

Oops, something went wrong with that last link.

It should be http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=483

I don't believe this. Third try:

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4837

I think blogs and online media are having a highly positive affect on politics. However I see the road to ruin.

If the rich and powerful – those with vested interests in promoting ever-bigger demand for their goods and services, or particular agendas – start to get organised, they could flood this medium with their views. Or they could perhaps pressure governments into making moderators of forums like this much more carefully vet posted material.

At the moment it seems pretty free to all sorts of views being expressed, and in a manner that approaches some sort of true representation in the wider community.

As a long-time writer of letters to the editors of several newspapers, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could post stuff on OLO that was just rejected by editors. The views on this forum seem much more environment/sustainability oriented than stuff you see on the letters page of most newspapers.

We saw the rise on environmentalism in the 80s. But we then saw it stagnate or even decline due I believe to a more strategic approach from big business, and their effect on media and government. Some of the environmental message has remained, but it certainly didn’t continue to develop like it appeared to be doing following Hawke’s stop to the Gordon below Franklin Dam project and into the Goss era in Queensland.

I fear that the same sort of thing could happen with this medium.