Liberal Blogs Are, Well, More Liberal About Participation

Study led by Yochai Benkler, Aaron Shaw and Victoria Stodden shows that liberal blogs use more modes of open collaboration and are more  likely to have moultiple authors:

Ari Melber, New Study: Liberals More Open Than Conservatives Online

[…] liberal blogs provide audience participation options at triple the rate of conservative sites. That means visitors to progressive sites are more empowered to contribute entire posts to the “front page,” and more likely to have their contributions or comments highlighted before potentially hundreds of thousands of readers.

The popular site DailyKos, for example, has over 160,000 registered users. On a traditional media site, those people would be relegated to commenting at the bottom of articles. Yet on DailyKos’s platform, every registered user can write guest entries. Social voting allows the community to pick favorite guest posts, which are featured on the main page. That kind of deep audience production and interaction is one reason that Daily Kos’s traffic, which tops 4 million page views a week, rivals the sites of many newspapers. In the blogosphere study, this kind of amateur writing is distinguished as “secondary content,” in contrast to the “primary content” by bloggers who control the means of production. And on this score, again, the study found that liberals are more into amplifying voices from the crowd.

“The Left adopts more fluid and permeable boundaries between primary and secondary content,” the study concludes.

Spotlighting audience contributions tends to give more political voice to “non-elites,” explains Aaron Shaw, who co-authored the study while working on his sociology PhD at Berkeley. Shaw believes these formats could spread well beyond the lefty blogosphere. “America’s entire public sphere could look very different in twenty years if these type of sites catch on,” Shaw told me. So far, however, user contributions haven’t even caught on across the aisle.

“The right adopts practices that more strictly separate secondary from primary content,” the study reports. In other words, many conservatives still run their sites like newspapers. The writers are credentialed on stage, while “letters to the editor” are clearly marked and parked in the back. Overall, 42 percent of the conservative blogs in the survey were run by one author, while 20 percent of the liberal sites were solo shows.

That is not necessarily an odd choice. After all, the audience for credentialed media still far outstrips citizen media. Plenty of popular blogs focus on a handful of promoted personalities, not a rotating diary section. And for most readers, these distinctions are just a matter of taste.

Big surprise: the conservatives are more controlling and the liberals more open and loose. In edge theory, this is totally predictable: the conservatives align with larger, centralized, entrenched organizations that tend to use broadcast models of communication, while the liberals are more likely to value decentralized, many:many communication.