Affiliations: [a] School of Political, Social and International Studies,
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. E-mail: scott.wright@uea.ac.uk | Institute of Communications Studies, Leeds University,
Leeds, UK
Abstract: This article analyses how and why councillors blog on the
government-funded civic-blogging platform, Read My Day. Through a mixture of
content analysis and interviews, the article assesses the kinds of
communication being facilitated and how the blogs were used during the 2007
local elections. The analysis and interpretations are framed by a critique of
the normalisation hypothesis. The article concludes that blogs were largely
used as tools of representation rather than for campaigning. The extent to
which they strengthen representative practices is mixed. Many bloggers fail to
exploit the networking potential of the medium such as creating blog rolls and
engaging with the broader blogosphere; this leads to a danger that the
politically-interested are talking to each other in isolation. Furthermore, the
number of comments is limited, and councillors often do not reply to these: it
is typically broadcast, one-way communication. However, there are potentially
important positive changes that must be fully considered alongside this. If it
is true to say that political communication is increasingly negative,
attack-orientated, dominated by political leaders and lacking in substance,
then the blogs on Read My Day do go some way to redress this: while it is an
example of how technologies are being normalised, it is not quite politics as
usual.
