That’s the provocative premise of Robert Cox, president of the nonpartisan Media Bloggers Association and a blogger who was made famous by the New York Times’ idiotic decision to sue him for posting a parody of its Corrections page. Writing in the Washington Examiner (which itself is rapidly earning attention as a smart new site for conservative online news and opinion), Cox takes as his jumping off point YouTube’s recent decision to delete some videos posted by rightwing blogger Michele Malkin after they were flagged by users as “offensive,” and to terminate her account.
He says he has talked to top Internet specialists on the right, including folks from the Bush-Cheney campaign, top officials at the RNC and the White House and dozens of top conservative bloggers, and none of them seemed concerned. “When I suggested that ceding control of the major ‘nodes’ in the online world to the left was a huge mistake, they were dismissive. It became clear they could not imagine one day finding themselves boxed out of what is fast becoming the biggest force in electoral politics.”
He goes on:
Some might note that Malkin can still host her videos elsewhere. Of course she can, but that would fail to understand the powerful forces of “network externalities” at play online. There is no Avis to eBay’s Hertz for good reason: Once an online network is fully catalyzed, there is no reason to join an alternative network. If you want to get the most money for your Beanie Baby collection, you are going to want access to the most potential bidders — and that means eBay.
YouTube is poised to become the eBay of video file sharing. If you want the biggest audience for your video, you want access to the most potential viewers — and that means YouTube.
Google understands this dynamic, which is why the company announced Monday that it will purchase YouTube — a company that has never made a dime — for $1.65 billion….
Don’t think it matters? Consider that, according to USA Today, 98 percent of the money donated to political parties by Google employees — “Google Millionaires” — went to Democrats.
But it’s not just Google’s media and financial muscle that benefits the left. Liberals run the leading blog search engine — Technorati. They run the leading blog software manufacturer — Six Apart. They invented two of the most important blogging technologies — Podcasting and RSS. The list goes on and on.
It may not matter who manufacturers your radio since all points on the dial are equally accessible and the choice is tiny compared to the number of Web sites, but on the Internet, where popularity is often directly proportional to technological acumen and popularity, once achieved, breeds more popularity, who builds what means everything.
I think Robert–a smart guy and friendly acquaintance of mine–is really off the mark here. For starters, there’s nothing keeping someone else from doing a little remixing of Malkin’s videos and reposting them on YouTube, and if enough people find them entertaining or valuable, the site will drive them to a larger audience.
Furthermore, the fact that Google’s employees are mostly Democrats has everything to do with the fact that most of them live in one of the most liberal areas of the country. There’s no evidence that as a result Google search results are biased to help liberals. In fact, Google is currently doing its best to buy access and influence the old-fashioned way in Washington, by hiring well-connected lobbyists (many of whom are Republicans). Google is a business, Robert, not an ideological organization. Same with the guys at Technorati and Six Apart.
That said, Cox is putting his finger on something. Right now, it does look like the liberal-progressive-left is dominating online politics. If you add up the readership of most leading political blogs, you’ll find that on an average day–the left’s audience is bigger than the right’s by more than 2-1. The RNC may have a bigger email list than the DNC, but there’s far more community activity apparent on the latter’s site than the former. ActBlue has aggregated more than $10 million in small donations online this cycle; the Republican side has nothing like that. Not only do progressives have MoveOn, with its 3 million email members, they have Care2, with its 6 million email members. Again, there’s nothing like that on the Republican side.
But disproportionate success for liberals online may have more to do with the fact that these sites and e-groups have been filling a vacuum that simply doesn’t exist for the right side of the spectrum with its dominance of talk radio and deep network of local church groups, gun rights groups and anti-abortion groups.
Still, there is one way in which Web 2.0–or, to use the less buzzword compliant phrase, “the read/write web”–does appear to work to the benefit of the left. Actually, to be very precise, not to the “left”, but to the ordinary person (if we had a real left in this country, instead of the cavalcade of narrow interest groups–we might think these words were synonymous, but obviously not). And that is because it shifts power away from the center of organizations out to the edges. Millions of us now can speak on a much more level playing field than anything that has ever existed before. By definition that is bad for elites and insiders. Which can’t be good news for the incumbent party in Washington.
I think pluralism is also hard-wired into the net, and especially into Web 2.0, where everyone is one click away from everyone else and (contrary to the fears of some), you are far more likely to encounter opposing viewpoints online than elsewhere. This again, it seems to me, means the web is inherently friendlier to people who value civic debate and engagement.
This is not to say that the web is full of liberals. It still trends to the wealthier, especially if you are looking at broadband users. And given the huge technosphere, which is as big or bigger than the political blogosphere, a lot of its politics is more libertarian than traditionally left or right. But even if it’s not by design, it does seem Cox is right, and the right is losing the online future.
That’s because the culture of Web 2.0 favors dissenters and creatives over conformists. If you are uncomfortable with free expression, you’re not going to like YouTube. It’s not “who builds what,” as Cox puts it, that “means everything,” it’s what is the web good for and what do people like to use it for, that means everything.
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