"Blogging" e política

Este apontamento do Comment is free (Guardian), Backpackers, bullies and internet myths, dá para reflectir sobre as potencialidades e limites dos novos instrumentos de comunicação on-line quanto à mobilização política dos cidadãos. Excertos:

Values are contained in messages, not
the means by which they are transmitted. That might sound obvious, but it is
something to which Britain's political class is blind. There is a fashion in
Westminster for thinking that the web may solve the problem of popular
disengagement from politics. All parties are working on online strategies,
convinced that the energy in a million buzzing web forums can be harnessed to
invigorate a political movement and cure apathy.

Politicians [os políticos ingleses, que se preocupam com estas coisas]
get excited by the demographics of Facebook and MySpace users - the young,
first-time voters, fresh blood. And they witness how the web has forced
complacent institutions, especially in the media, to transform their business
models. Politics, they figure, must surely follow. The future is e-government;
wiki-government; WebCameron; have-you-blogged-yet-minister? There is a false logic underlying
this assumption. It goes thus: politicians have become removed from civil
society and the lives of "real people". Blogs and social networking sites are
full of "real people" interacting with each other, so the web can be a short cut
to where civil society is happening.

Anyone who has spent time blogging will
have noticed how people on the web coalesce into homogeneous groups, based on
age, class, tastes. Tribes form and reinforce their identity with codes and
shibboleths. Opinions are expressed and arguments made, but minds are rarely
changed. This is a problem for politicians who need to build loose coalitions of
supporters from different backgrounds and different generations. Democracy needs
to be more than a collection of discrete peer-to-peer conversations. It requires
the accommodation of mutually exclusive views under a covenant of tolerance. It
requires that citizens accept membership of a single community and moderate
their behaviour towards one another, even when they disagree.

The web is no community. It is brilliant for some things. It
does information, misinformation, entertainment and commerce. It does freedom.
But one thing it doesn't do is democracy.