A sieve order: Weblog design, democracy and deliberative space

This cultural ethnography captures a temporal snapshot of a nationally prominent weblog in its developing medium, tracing its trajectory of growth as a deliberative writing space. This study specifically examines the tension perpetually attending this weblog, called DailyKos, as its members sought both to establish the site as a mainstream force for Democratic (party) politics offline, and to accommodate the influx of users who, at this historical moment in particular, hungered for a virtual reconstruction of a Habermasian (democratic, "ideal") community-space.; This endeavor also analyzes the specific design structure of DailyKos and its "nodal networks"--specifically, how its "media grammars," and the use-choices that activate them, worked to shape, facilitate, and constrain democratic communication, and how each recursively affected the circulation and character of felt-agency among users, especially those occupying more-subaltern subject positions.; This study concludes that the distinctive many-to-many architecture of this particular blog served a Habermasian ideal of a "deliberative democracy" in its facilitation of rapid networking and collaborative research, as well as in its use as a "magnifier," "amplifier," and as an electronic "repeater" for subaltern voices and perspectives.; This study concludes conversely that DailyKos' pursuit of success as a political agent in the offline world, enforced by the virtual use-choices its "feudal" leaders' made in developing and applying its unique economy of social capital, at times dramatically compromised the quality of its democratic exchange, its sometime pretense of collective ownership, and its consideration of vulnerable subalternaities.; However, this study also finds that the playing-out of novel forms of virtual resistance that many DailyKos participants exerted in favor of a more egalitarian free-speech zone acted to forge ideological and discursive territory that led to the creation of new kinds of community landscapes, and new uses of "media languages" that arguably came far closer than DailyKos to achieving the kind of "ideal speech situation" and "deliberative democratic space" towards which Habermas and other pedagogical thinkers continue to argue and reach.