What is the reason behind The Sharpener?
What is the point of The Sharpener? I don’t ask the question rhetorically but rather as an exercise in some early navel-gazing. It has been just over a month since we re-launched and with the meetup coming up, this seems an opportune time to ask.
Blogs need a ‘reason’ to succeed and do well. You may disagree of course but behind every averagely popular blog is a reason. Or exceptional writing, but let’s not go into that *cough*
More specifically political blogs need a reason to prosper and build their audiences. They need someone to rant at, they need controversies that people can vent feelings over and they need a general editorial line readers can identify with. Most importantly political blogs need attention and committment from the author and hence they need a reason to exist.
You may not be familiar with their full names but Jerome and Kos run MyDD and DailyKos respectively, the two most popular liberal blogs on the planet.
The book (and the review more briefly) follow the growth of the American left-wing blogosphere on the back of the 2004 election. They had found their reason: to organise an effective opposition to the Republican party using blogs as a grassroots medium and and, riding on the back of increased participation, force the MSM to take notice and occasionally follow their agenda. For example:
When The Washington Post kept repeating the GOP’s charge that disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff gave money to Democrats as well as to Republicans, on-line activists assembled data and organized an overwhelming response, showing that Abramoff mainly worked with Republicans. This finding was soon picked up by the press and television and much less was heard about Abramoff’s evenhandedness.
Of course politics in the United States is a lot more belligerent and divided almost equally into two warring sides. That makes it easy for people to take sides. But the analogy is somewhat useful for this side of the pond too. The blogosphere can also be more democratic and organised in a way that the MSM cannot be. Again, taking the American example, the review states:
What gives Kos and Jerome credibility is less their solid and straightforward book than the Web community they’ve helped to inspire and build. It includes a series of literally interlinked sites, ranging from the enormous if somewhat predictable, such as MoveOn.org, partially financed by George Soros, to the tiny and tightly focused.
A few are expert blogs on particular topics: the University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, for instance, gives detailed accounts of the day’s events in Iraq at his Informed Comment site, JuanCole.com. Others derive from more traditional journalism: Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo (www.talkingpointsmemo.com) employs a couple of full-time reporters to uncover and explain the latest developments in the Republican congressional scandals. Others are more traditional blogs.
You get the idea.
So I come back to my original question. What is the reason behind The Sharpener? What is its purpose? You may accuse me of taking things too seriously, and you may be partly right, but I believe we need to figure out why this blog exists and what is its purpose, or it will start meandering.
Do we discuss anything and everything? Or do we, as a political blog, formulate some sort of a strategy akin to our American cousins and figure out if we can forge a common political agenda and take that forward? You may be unsurprised to hear that I favour the latter option.
In one way we are halfway there. Many political blogs featured here have their strengths on particular issues, partly the reason why I was happy to join this bunch. Along with promises of fame, fortune and female groupies of course but how quickly reality bites.
All we need now, providing some or all of want to do this, is figure out how we can play to the strengths of the blogging medium and use that to punch above our weight as the American blogosphere has done. The review above gives some examples of how this has happened.
If we believe there is an opportunity here and we do need strategic direction, then some questions to consider would be: how do we wish to influence party politics; what strengths can we leverage better than the MSM; and how can we put these ideas into practice? Essentially, what do we stand for and how can we get there?
Given, all this sounds very idealistic. But at the very least I wanted to kick start a discussion on how we can use The Sharpener as a platform to influence change in a way many other blogs on the other side of the pond have managed.
Well. I am looking forward to discussing this down the pub. And I will pop my post cherry soon, I promise.
How do we move from typing it to living it? That is what I am thinking about, and hopeing to discus with as many as can be mustered, on and off-line…
The contributors to The Sharpener come from such a wide range of perspectives that it will be impossible to ‘forge a common political agenda’.
I don’t come (or, more recently, contribute) to The Sharpener for a unified purpose. I’m here because I want to read intelligent and informed writing about political issues. I cherish the way it is done here, that it doesn’t go into insults and chest-beating but stays respectful and people defend or amend their position.
It’s easy for me to find a load of bloggers I basically agree with and we can spend all day telling each other how right we are. I want my ideas tested.
I presume that we are all labouring under misapprehensions, we are all acting on beliefs that can be proven wrong. I want to find out which bits of my thinking are like that and jettison them. I want to find those bits in other people and make them move on.
The Sharpener is a very rare place where people do get to preach to someone other than the choir, and if we all deal honestly then we help each other refine our ideas and move towards a future that makes more sense.
That, to me, is the closest we can come to the point of The Sharpener. Its diversity, its lack of a defined single political direction is precisely what gives it its value.
I agree with Merrick. Forging a common political agenda is a spectacularly bad idea.
Even if we called it the Paddington Manifesto?
I’m not necessarily saying everyone should be forced together towards a common cause whether they like it or not.
True, we are here because we liked informed comment and articles etc, but politically that means we have no impact, despite the potential. To be honest I see that as a bit of a waste.
At the very least some idea to pull together the myriad of websites that focus on “building a better democracy” etc may also be worthwhile. We need more thinking and discussion on this I feel…otherwise it call peter off pretty quickly.
I’m not sure what you mean by having no political impact. I only see that as being true if you define it in terms of seriously and directly affecting mainstream party politics.
We write well thought out political writing; a lot of people read it. Beyond that, it’s hard to measure.
Sure, The Sun has more readers in a day than The Sharpener will in a century, but I’m confident that our political impact on those who do read us is far greater.
Even trying to tie us together with something about ‘building a better democracy’ would have to have a definition of democracy of such sub-Eustonite wooliness as to be meaningless.
‘Forging a common political agenda’ seems to me to be another way of saying ‘developing a dogma’, and given our worthy promise of ‘debate without dogma’, I think it’s a mistake for The Sharpener to try.
Its diversity, its lack of a defined single political direction is precisely what gives it its value.
That’s bang on. Forging any sort of common position on anything more substantial than the basic rules of the game will be impossible here. And a good thing too: “common positions” are antithetical to what we’re about, I think.
Having said all that, Sunny is absolutely right: we should aim to make the most of what we create. We’re probably not doing that. All ideas welcome…
Isn’t the Sharpener meant to be more about debate than results? Most of the blogs that seem to think they’re one-(wo)man pressure groups border on the unreadable. I’m not here because I seriously expect to change anything, but because I think it’ll improve both my thinking and my writing to engage in debate and watch my ideas get torn to shreds by a bunch of intelligent politically minded types. (Something, incidentally, I have so far singularly failed to achieve.)
All that said, if there is one thing that unites the British blogs of most political positions its a distrust of the kind of centralized authoritarian politics that spews from Blair’s mouth daily.