Wrinkled Weasel has been sharing some interesting ideas with me on the value or not of blogging as a propaganda tool.

He argues that blogging lacks ‘semiotic subtlety/stability’:

Unless you state your case unequivocally, the point tends to get missed. If one were to attempt a propaganda blog, the writer would need to be fairly obvious about it or the message would be skipped. People give the impression they skim read blogs or not at all, responding to key phrases and words, and accordingly, the blog comments often appear to bear little relation to what you might call “discourse”.

Semiotics can be said to relate to “interpretive communities”. In the blogosphere these interpretive communities form and change very quickly. Guido is a prime example of this. If you were to show the comments thread to an educated person of say 25 years ago, they would find it hard to follow the meaning because they would be searching with obsolete interpretive tools, such as a sense of linear narrative, inculcated by a classic style of education. Fisking would have been an alien concept.

The real life parallel of blogging is a bar room rant, not an exchange of letters on Basildon Bond notepaper …

… If there is anything that could be described as “discourse” in the blog world, it moves very quickly and is non-linear, which is why a lot of it becomes reduced to swear bloggery and ranting, since you do not have the time and reflection to agree on the meanings of terms, and “arsehole” or “jerk” tends to sum things up wonderfully.

This all sounds right, especially the non-linear idea. There is a lot of literature now on how biological (non-linear) rather than machine-age (linear) metaphors are the right way to look at the way Internet attentions speedily and unpredictably ebb and flow. See eg this. And this.

Contrast that unruly world ‘where orders emerge‘ with this old-style way of Getting the Message Out:

All of which goes a long way to show why the McBride idea for a Labourish attempt to copy Guido to get out Labour messages was so deeply stupid in itself, let along obnoxious in the way it was conceived.

The whole point of the blogging/Internet world is its freedom, spontaneity and agility. An invented propaganda device carefully and discreetly (haha) steered from Downing Street can not possibly work in the same way.

Related to this is the drama we bloggers/writers all have of building a readership. This at best can be done only slowly, patiently and with a certain generosity of spirit if one is to do more than bring together a group of people who enjoy doses of trashy gossip and/or four-letter ranting and want little else.

Which is why Conservative Home works well – a political site whose overall style and content are ‘owned’ by its own community of readers, and therefore grows nicely.

All this said, maybe bloggers/writers of a generally like-minded view themselves create an ‘interpretive community’ of people who bounce ideas to and fro within their own ranks and end up locked in their own prejudices, much too unexposed to counter-arguments?

Thus the emergence of nerdy, boring political e-ghettoes. Is Twittering a way to end them, if ending them is thought to be a good idea?

Finally, bloggers love to bang on about the iniquities and incompetence of the mainstream media, whose journalists in turn uneasily bang on about the soaring irresponsibility and trivialisation brought about by blogging.

To use another biological metaphor, are the MSM a group of elderly and lazy sharks, while bloggers are the Remora fish who swim around their jaws and backends picking up decaying morsels for the mutual benefit of both species?

Thus:

The relationship between remoras and their hosts is most often taken to be one of commensalism, specifically phoresy. The host they attach to for transport gains nothing from the relationship, but also loses little. The remora benefits by using the host as transport and protection and also feeds on materials dropped by the host.

There is some controversy over whether a remora’s diet is primarily leftover fragments, or actually the feces of the host.

Which sounds about right to me.