Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Watching The Watchdog: Bloggers As The Fifth Estate, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

This author is inclined to think that social structures which evolve through the voluntary interactions and exchanges among people, such as the blogosphere, tend in general to be more beneficial than structures created through the deliberate exercise of power, however well-intentioned, such as regulatory bureaucracies. That idea cannot be fully explored here. For our purposes, we can simply note that the blogosphere would seem to be a near-perfect instantiation of the ideal discourse.