Politics and power  

PG has a skeptical post up about Daniel Drezner's capacity for writing an evenhanded "scholarly paper on the power and politics of blogging". I haven't been a consistent reader of Drezner, but I became interested this week when I noticed he's teaching a class on Global Governance here at U of C, which should be right up my alley. I contacted him for a syllabus yesterday, and as I should have expected, it's loaded up with theoretical political economy papers... which especially made sense when I saw this bit from PG:

I finally figured out what troubles me about Drezner's generally fair and intelligent blogging - he assumes that everyone is an old hand at politics, and that one ought to be able to see through any dissembling or deception easily.

I first noticed this when he wrote dismissively about concerns over the false claims that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium from Niger. The presumption was that because Drezner thought the war justified for reasons that didn't require the Bush Administration to have been strictly truthful in their case for Hussein's being a proximate threat, "righteous indignation" over this falsity was excessive.

Political economy is all about looking at political systems in terms of structures - all the assumptions about individuals consist of the same "rational actor" programming, so that "strategic misrepresentation" is expected. Nevermind for the moment that this might be a cynical view of human nature; the Bush Administration's ultimately false justifications for Iraq can be explained simply by looking at by the political structures we have and the incentives they create. I certainly don't mean to put words in Mr Drezner's mouth - just thought it added up well.

Meanwhile, I'm very interested in his project on the political relevance of blogs, and he's certainly in a unique position to do something interesting with it. But I do think his definition of weblog is imprecise:

A weblog is defined here as a web page with minimal to no external editing, dedicated to on-line commentary, periodically updated and presented in reverse chronological order, with hyperlinks to other online sources.

Online commentary? Maybe if you come at it from a poststructuralist angle blogs are commentary no matter what they say (or don't say), but I seriously doubt that's the intention of this definition. Especially after the experience I've had wading through the participants in the Chicago Blogmap, it's clear to me that many blogs aren't at all dedicated to commentary - there are some fiction and photography blogs, recipe blogs, and most of all there are confessional blogs, that aren't commentary in any but the widest possible (ie meaningless) sense.

What's much more important is the form itself - entries in reverse chronological order, links to other web locations (or sometimes not), and frequent updates. The fact that there are so many different kinds of blogs is a testament to the genius and flexibility of that form. I suspect that like all of us, Mr Drezner's understanding is mostly informed by the blogs he reads - which is fine, but not for a definition of weblog.