The Internet and the National Discourse in the Fall of 2004
Blogs are hot. Two Pew surveys conducted in early 2005 show that 16% of U.S. adults (32 million) are blog readers. After a 58% jump in readership in 2004, this number marks a leveling off within the survey’s margin of error. But the blogger audience now commands respect: it stands at 20% of the newspaper audience and 40% of the talk radio audience. Meanwhile, 6% of the entire U.S. adult population has created a blog. That’s 11 million people, or one out of every 17 American. Technorati recorded theten millionth blog in its worldwide tracking system this month.
The bloggers are fast to spot items of interest; they link to sources so that items may be verified and inspected at length; and they embroider items with witty captions and frequently passionate commentaries. One possibility is that bloggers have a distinct set of priorities and proclivities, that they have emerged as a sort of Fifth Estate.
The strength of the correspondences between the blogs and the media, on one hand, and the blogs and the online chat groups, on the other, lends credence to the contention that blogs are positioned between the two other channels as a sort of guide for the media to the rest of the internet.
Perhaps it’s not that they have a separate agenda, but that they have a distinct role to play on a topic of common interest. Different methods of processing information are, after all, a large part of what distinguishes the traditional four estates.
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