I have to admit I am ignorant about attitudes. I have never really got down to a bedrock understanding of how they develop and what they signify, except that I consider they are important in relations to other people. It is, I think, a common skill that people are able to pick up attitudes stated and implied, perhaps using different cues. My take, to misquote David Bohm is that attitudes are “frozen emotions”, as distinct from “frozen light”.
It is fairly clear that attitudes can be studied by, for example opinion polling, and can be cooked by clever use of public relations. Hence the use of frames that work. The remarkable thing about these frames, carefully planted in “the mainstream” among “average voters” is that they are more often than not ignorant. Ignorance has been defined. Examples include the framing of Reverend Wright and Black Liberation Theology, that Obama is a Muslim and that Clinton has a record of working for the White working class. In so far as “the mainstream” fall for sophisticated methods of opinion formation they show themselves to be ignorant, hopefully less ignorant that I about attitudes. Rare indeed, it seems to me, are we asked by what we know. For example, I suspect that Tucson is to the west of Phoenix - but I could be wrong about that.
Opinion pieces, to which blogs and newspaper columns lend themselves, are likely to incorporate “frozen emotions” to the point that the logical argument is forgotten as a detached pursuit of what is likely to be true, and so degenerate (editorial comment) into rants.
Christine Kerr in The Australian was highly critical of Liberal staffers writing:
They will have noticed that the two key staff involved in the Victorian blogs affair, Simon Morgan and John Osborn, are both in their twenties.
There is a feeling amongst many political observers that by the end of the Howard years all the Liberals had left were child soldiers.
These young federal Liberal staffers haven’t seen opposition. They have been used to having public servants around in government to do much of the heavy lifting for them.
Liberals joke about union hacks. At least they mix with workers. They should realise that their own offices are filled with twenty and thirty somethings hanging around in taxpayer or party-subsidised jobs waiting for a safe seat.
Too many of these are immature. They think that online smears are clever. Real political professionals know that the Australian blog world is insular, often ignorant and has virtually no influence on mainstream debate.
Lyn at Public Opinion takes up the contention in the last sentence. It seems to me that blogs are inherently global in nature, that while some blog writers may be ignorant the capacity to link to reliable sources of information is something the printed page cannot do, and they potentially represent a space to engage in rational argument if their writers are of that mind and capacity, independent of the mainstream debate, which is often framed by special interests operating behind the scenes and frozen into formulations for the receptive, passive, overawed audience. It seems to me that mainstream media creates a sense of a kind of village or community that in fact has no reality, whereas blogs potentially through comments can create communication, hence community in an true sense.
Television has not served democracy well, but blogging might.
