Cobb

Thanks for posting this. I just discovered your blog today, and while I'm far from conservative, I think I'll at least check out what you have to say from time to time.

I'm very interested in reading about what's happening in the blogosphere, mainly because I think it's a powerful tool of expression, though it's interesting to observe its social and political effect and the direction it's going.

Anyway, after I read the paper, I might come back for further posts.

Thanks for posting this. I just discovered your blog today, and while I'm far from conservative, I think I'll at least check out what you have to say from time to time.

I'm very interested in reading about what's happening in the blogosphere, mainly because I think it's a powerful tool of expression, though it's interesting to observe its social and political effect and the direction it's going.

Anyway, after I read the paper, I might come back for further posts.

Just wanted to add that it's interesting how David Kline and Dan Burtein didn't touch on bloggers of color in their current book, Blog!: How the newest media revolution is changing politics, business, and culture. As will all forms of media, we again have to make our voices heard amongst the White dominate culture and class.

I am not convinced that there is a great deal of change to be made by black politics. Rather the great change will be made IN black politics. It will become more conservative and its radicals will be moderated. Black politics will come to mirror American politics and then it will disappear altogether.

What blacks do in the blogosphere, I think, is indicative of that internal change. Why Kline and others are not noticing is the same reason nobody in particular is noticing. There isn't much impetus behind it. There is no black power movement, per se. Just as black Americans are getting wealthier, healthier and more educated, it is a silent evolution.

Progressives and liberals may try to make a great deal of hay over the significance of the marginalization of a sizeable black population. But I think they lack both the brainpower and allegiances to capitalize on this change in any significant fashion. They are both incapable of drafting into their ranks the numbers of capable people who would make something of this. And since the gains made by certain blacks in the middle class could be erased - and that is not particularly significant on a macro economic level, there is really nowhere for them to go. Where they would seek to racialize the economic fate of 10 or 15 million failing Americans, everybody else sees that all the time.

In other words, the economic impact of losing half of the black middle class is less than that of raising the price of a barrel of oil 50%. In light of the fact that oil prices are indeed rising at historical levels, nobody gives a crap about any racial politics progressives or liberals could cobble together (as if they could get 50% black voter turnout). So their efforts to politically capitalize on the fate of the despised Forty Percent (Cosby's enemies) is doomed even further.

Times are tough all over.

So what black blogs will do is reflect the inevitable internal change. But the consequences for the nation are generally subsumed into the bigger picture which is not particularly in need of a black perspective. The only people that read are the people who care about what P6 calls 'black intrapolitics'. That means you and me and maybe another 50k people who bother to read black political blogs daily.

I'm proud of my drops in that bucket. But I know it's a small bucket.