The individualistic nature of new media allows for the unlimited filtering of media content. With the facilitation of content personalization has come the polarization of political opinion. At the source of political polarization is arguably the political blog. Inevitably, political blogs tend to express the viewpoints of a particular party or faction, and appeal to, and are thus read by, people of like sympathies. Furthermore, Teachout (2005) asserts that more and more young Americans are turning away from mainstream media in favor of new media as their news sources. He attests that even when they do turn to mainstream media, such as newspapers, “the web-oriented Americans tend to find them by going to blogs and other websites whose proprietors pick and choose at will from the mainstream media’s offerings, linking to some stories and ignoring others according to their political inclinations,” (Teachout, 2005, 43).
According to Thomas B. Edsall (2007), web-based political sites are, in many ways, becoming more important than newspapers. Political blogs and related sites such as Politico, the Huffington Post, Salon, Slate, the National Review Online, and the Wall Street Journal Online have grown to play vital roles in policy making and election coverage. Political blog sites, such as the Huffington Post, (which is somewhat unbiased as compared with other political blog sites), have the ability to hyperlink to thousands of other news sources. These sources include endless numbers of both liberal and conservative “blogrolls.” These “blogroll” sites then connect readers to politically varied sites, such as RealClearPolitics, TalkingPointsMemo, Instapundit, Taegan Goddard’s PoliticalWire, and the Drudge Report, (Edsall, 2007).
Furthermore, the surging popularity of left and right-winged blogs has become a crucial source for politicians with regards to their campaigns. Campaign staffers currently search for blog postings which positively reflect their candidates and which negatively reflect their opponents. The staffers then mass e-mail these comments, treating them as news releases to both the mainstream media and to new media sources.
One theoretical perspective of new media’s role in the political sphere centers on technological determinism. Technological determinism is the view that a society’s technology imprints its own logic on the culture, social relationships, and history of that society. However, an alternative approach, as pronounced by Philip E. Agre (2002), asserts that there are a multitude of ways, in which the users of technology allocate the technology for the purposes of providing the service of goals, strategies, and relationships. This perspective, known as the amplification model, can be applied to new media’s role in politics. Specifically, the amplification model relates to, among other things, the development of social networks and ways that new media technology can be used to connect people together to form a polity. Thus, the political blog serves as an emblematic example of the amplification model.
With regards to blogging, there are differing theories as to whether blogs function in support of mainstream media or counter to it. According to David Michael Ryfe (2007), writer, Andrew Sullivan, has argued that blogging is “the most significant media revolution since the arrival of television.” This view attests that bloggers are challenging, and possibly even supplanting, traditional news media. However, the opposing perspective presumes that blogs, though an important and significant new media technology, have had less effect on American politics than is generally assumed. This perspective is affirmed by Mark Tremayne in Blogging, Citizenship, and the Future of Media, and by Stephen D. Cooper in Watching the Watchdog. According to proponents of this view, blogs have taken up a symbiotic relationship with the mainstream media, as opposed to a competitive one. Furthermore, Cooper and Tremayne claim that the mainstream media have had as much effect on blogging as blogs have had on them. (Ryfe, 2007: 5-6).
