I’m sober!

I thought I was disagreeing with Christian on his measure of influence!

Also - I agree that “election results” are just one place to look for influence, as I wrote earlier - that’s why I think how opinions affect electoral behaviour (”votes”) might be too limiting also. I still think elections are important (duh), but the interesting thing about studying online stuff is that you can get some idea of how influence plays out in different temporalities - around the discussion of particular, intense but short-term issues, for example.

Sorry - perhaps I wasn’t clear enough in the last comment in saying that the question of one “supplanting” the other is misleading - I think we may be agreed there, too. There’s too much research and opinion premised on the “revolutionary impact of bla”. It’s not necessarily a zero-sum game, particularly with niche audiences.

Advertising might be a whole different question - to get apples and apples you may need to look at comparing online political communication strategies from candidates. The latest stuff I’ve read suggests that these may be changing the “supply-chain” of small donations and volunteer labour far more than they are voting intention.

It’s also a moot question, I think, how much influence the media have on “election results”. Nowhere near as much as they think, in my view. I’d have to sit down with the AES properly, but my recollection and my experience of polling is that advertising and free media - ie pollies’ direct messaging - is much more important. So I think the question needs reframing! We shouldn’t be asking “are bloggers supplanting the media”? but rather “how are political opinions formed and changed so as to change or reinforce votes?”…

I’ve got a piece in NM today suggesting that anxieties about the “influence” of bloggers is more clearly felt in “quality media” circles because they are in the same niche as political bloggers. That’s not the first time I’ve made this argument. But there’s no evidence that I’m aware of that this is a zero-sum game in terms of audience share - it’s just as likely that this particular audience is omnivorous and will consume almost as much political content as you put in front of them.

I think that some of the anxiety and conflict in this area is about about rises and falls in social and cultural capital - yet another way of understanding “influence” - which is why sometimes it gets rather more intense than we might expect.

I firmly believe that one key to getting all this is understanding how intra-elite debates operate, and then how they spill out into broader conversations. But I think that referring to “opinion-makers” might be shifting the question. Among the things that need to be examined is how political opinion is articulated and disseminated, and how and why that’s changing, if at all. If political bloggers only have a PJ audience, this might still be vitally important, because they’re reframing and expanding elite conversations. To what extent? In what directions? Clearly, opinion leadership isn’t a mysterious magnetic force - it’s material, institutional and in enough cases it’s legible.

Obviously, communications studies and political science have more sophisticated models of this kind of “influence” than dusty old “hypodermic” ones. The idea is to build on these, and innovate further - I think the network analyses of the blogosphere Axel has been working on are a good example here.

How bloggers might trip further switches for a broader “influence” is an open question, but I think election 07 developments like Dennis Atkins rehearsing bloggers’ arguments in his C-M columns are very interesting. I’ve been trying to do interviews and more qualitative work to find out more about these processes - but here again, the question of influence gets more complex the longer you stare at it.

I couldn’t possibly guess how many people toss away the front section of the Oz! Also, I’m not sure who you’re suggesting is operating within a “media effects” model - most of the scholarship I’ve been frustrated by in recent weeks has been more like unreconstructed McLuhanism.

Anyhow, you’re right - there’s “influence”, “influence” and then there’s “influence”. I think folks like CK are thinking for the moment about the kind of influence that changes election results, or easily alters the course of politcal debate. I’m not sure bloggers have that kind of pull yet, but is this the only index of influence?