Blogging for democracy: deliberation, autonomy, and reasonableness in the blogosphere

Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, Vol. 12, No. 3, pg. 443-468.

John W. Maynor

This paper critically examines the rising popularity of blogging in the US as a new kind of public space that has the potential to extend and deepen the way in which we interact and engage each other in political discourse. To proponents of deliberative democracy these moves are promising since they seem to point to the development of vibrant online public forums where political issues can be freely and openly debated. In this paper I evaluate this promise and ask whether or not blogging is consistent with the main theoretical tenets of deliberative democracy. My argument is that, despite some shortcomings, there is significant potential for the blogosphere to develop into a meaningful deliberative community

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