environmental | writing notes

The recent regulations in Sweden created the Pirate Party. The even more recent controversies with FRA (massive surveillance legislation) and ipred (strengthening copyright holders rights) and the Pirate Bay trial have driven the new parties marketing for them. Yesterday the party passed the 10 000 member level.

The Pirate Party is now larger than both the established Left Party and the Environmental Party making it the sixth largest party (counted in members) in Sweden. Swedish wikipedia has a table of party members here.

That the implementation of strickter internet regulation would increase the popularity of the Pirate Party should hardly be surprising. It is possible that few politicians in other parties were aware of the amount of popular anger was brewing under the surface and how this was organised and created into a more organised protest movement. In this way the growth of the Pirate Party is definately unintended but not unexpected.

On Friday I will be attending a meeting for green bloggers in Stockholm arranged by the Swedish green party (wanted to write Swedish greens but there was too much temptation for bad vegetable puns). During the meeting I will be giving a lecture on the role of the blogger as a social debater and I am looking forward to presenting some ideas on this topic.

Beyond the obvious short intro (minuscule) on what is a blog? and why is it different anyway? the question that must be addressed is whether or not the blogger has a role as a social debater? Naturally there are blogs that impact highly on the broader social debate but many of these belong to individuals or groups who are naturally part of the social debate and in these cases the blog is simply a different technical platform. The easiest example of this is a politician with a blog where the technology does not really create the social debater but only provides an alternate platform.

In the latter category I also want to add corporate blogs which are basically (but not exclusively) marketing tools.

But then there are plenty of blogs which seem to have created new social debaters, individuals who previously had no voice now have been empowered (ugly word, but valuable concept) and enabled into presenting their views. The question here is – what is their social impact? The blog gives them voice but does this shape social change?

Then there are the blogs which have masses of hits but low social impact. Fashion blogs, sex blogs, voyeur blogs, athletes blogs etc etc these generate masses of hits but can a million hits be the same as a social debate?

Finally there are the mass of unread blogs highbrow, lowbrow, academic, quirky, personal, public, exhibitionist and therapeutic. It would be easy to attempt to claim unread = no social impact but these may be the potentially important social movers. From the unread backwaters of the internet ideas have spread before and therefore it is difficult to simply sweep aside the masses of unread bloggers as socially unimportant.

As I said I am really looking forward to Friday… and if you are in Stockholm why dont you drop in? Here is the invite on Facebook