The logos of the blogosphere: flooding the zone, invention, and attention in the Lott Imbroglio.

• Author: Pfister, Damien Smith
• Position: Essay

Less than a decade after the network of weblogs called the blogosphere emerged, so-called news and politics bloggers have been recognized as potent agents of public deliberation. However, before December 2002, bloggers toiled in relative obscurity as boutique websites with small audiences and questionable influence. Since then, bloggers have been instrumental in constituting the networked public sphere, (1) a concept that captures the evolution of the public sphere in an era of widely diffused digital mediation (Benkler, 2006; Friedland, Hove, & Rojas, 2006; Lim & Kann, 2008; Xenos, 2008). Bloggers are now considered key intermediaries brokering developments in the contemporary and continuous news cycle (Boehlert, 2009; Davis, 2009; Kahn & Kellner, 2004; Perlmutter, 2008). Despite the acclaim bloggers have received from scholars who recognize their contribution to informal deliberation about civic controversies, there has been a dearth of theorizing about the unique argumentative practices bloggers bring to episodes of deliberation. This essay identifies how citizens in internetworked societies generate communicative power by copiously producing digital discourse, or flooding the zone, and theorizes how this metaphor sheds light on internetworked patterns of deliberation. Flooding the zone can be connected to rhetorical invention, the generative process through which novel arguments are articulated, and this linkage clarifies how bloggers are able to shape the news agenda through public argument.

Scholars of public deliberation are attending anew to rhetorical invention of public argument (Heidlebaugh, 2008; McNamee & Shorter, 2004). The importance of invention to public deliberation is neatly summarized in the now familiar debate over Cass Sunstein's (2001, 2009) work on the internet and political fragmentation (see Dahlberg, 2007 for a broader overview; see Adamic & Glance, 2005 for direct application to the blogosphere). Sunstein cautions that digital media produce a cultural environment with a latent risk of political fragmentation. Citizens in an era of information abundance can-must, even-tailor their attention economies to like-minded interlocutors who confirm pre-existing ideological inclinations, resulting in extremism and a gradual weakening of the social glue that underpins democratic deliberation. Digital media become a "driver of homogeneity" rather than a "driver of opposition" like the broadcast media purports to be (Lev-On & Manin, 2009, p. 7). According to Sunstein, digital media enclaves produce more intense rancor in public discourse and foreclose opportunities to discover the common ground necessary to legitimate public deliberation. The risk of digitally enclaved deliberation is that citizens abdicate a core (liberal) democratic responsibility: listening to differing opinions.

But enclaves are not entirely antithetical to democratic practice. Amplifying an underappreciated element of Sunstein's (2001) hypothesis on enclaves, this essay examines the role of "argument pools" in deliberation (p. 68-80). Sunstein argues that enclaved deliberation is occasionally desirable because it increases the sophistication of reasoning, thus deepening the reservoirs of argument citizens draw upon in making decisions. The civil rights movement is his signature example of how protected sites of deliberation prepared citizens to articulate well-practiced arguments in broader spheres of public deliberation. Robert Branham's (1995) exploration of how debating in prison fueled the argumentative range and prowess of Malcolm X is an extreme, but salient, example of how enclaves at a remove from the conventional public sphere can eventually fund public deliberation. Enclaves, which can encompass cultural, material, and/or mediated publics, are rich sites for invention (Squires, 2001; Zulick & Laffoon, 1991). Despite the group polarization risks that Sunstein identifies, I argue the blogosphere performs a valuable democratic function in countering the homogeneity of the institutional press by supporting a communicative site for expanding the topoi, or lines of argument, that shape public deliberation. (2)

To make this case, I examine Trent Lott's now infamous December 2002 toast to Strom Thurmond, in which he made comments widely perceived as sympathetic to segregationist politics. Lott's toast was, at first, barely covered by the institutional press. Only after bloggers started connecting the toast to Thurmond's past deeds did the press pick up the story and eventually generate public pressure for Lott to resign his Senate Majority Leader post. The aftermath of the Lott toast is often used to illustrate the political power of the blogosphere, because it was the first time that public arguments emerging from blogs gained widespread public attention. A close, in-depth examination of this single case is justified in order to establish a cogent recent history of what Benkler (2006) calls "the founding myth of the blogosphere's journalistic potency" (pp. 262-3). In order to consider the features of networked deliberation, I first trace the conventional late modern model of public deliberation articulated by Jurgen Habermas and demonstrate how that formulation has an impoverished account of networked argument practices. I detail how bloggers' interventions in the Trent Lott case deepened argument pools by flooding the zone and then more explicitly make the link between that communicative practice and invention. Finally, I identify how the concept of flooding the zone has been co-opted by administrative institutions to manipulate public deliberation.

HABERMAS AND THE "PROBLEM" OF THE INSTITUTIONAL MEDIA

Jurgen Habermas's (1989) account of the emergence of publicity in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe remains one of the touchstones for theorizing how democratic collectives produce and circulate reasoned opinions capable of directing the institutions that structured modern life. One of the threads running through both "early Habermas" and "late Habermas" is the relationship of mass-mediated communication to public deliberation. His most recent contribution to this ongoing conversation identifies independence for media organizations and communicative reflexivity of citizens as two conditions for the activation of deliberative legitimation processes (Habermas, 2006). Both criteria protect public deliberation. Media organizations that are beholden to state or corporate institutions are unlikely to use their powerful agenda-setting functions in a democratic fashion; similarly, a citizenry unwilling or unable to use its critical faculties is unlikely to generate public opinion of any weight.

There is a way to read Habermas rhetorically that (1) explains how the political economy of the mass media dampens the inventional processes necessary to legitimate public deliberation processes and (2) draws out how invention from peripheral actors ought to function in public deliberation. This interpretation of Habermas provides a useful framework to scrutinize the democratic capacities of the contemporary institutional press. Put simply, the for-profit press reduces and homogenizes opinions in order to meet commercial imperatives. This is often at odds with the circulation of novel arguments capable of stimulating rhetorical innovation and cultural change in public conversation (Bohman, 1996, p. 199).Jon Stewart's memorable appearance on CNN's Crossfire on October 15, 2004, is a representative anecdote. Stewart (2004) famously called out co-hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala for being partisan hacks echoing shopworn talking points in an artificial debate format that was "hurting America." The Cross fire model mirrors tendencies across commercial mass media: established figures are called in to represent polarized opinions, their well-rehearsed talking points are aimed at scoring immediate political gain, and the shades of grey often coloring public controversies are eliminated because it makes for bad spectacle. In the language of argumentation theory, the political economy of commercial mass mediated deliberation thus reduces the topoi of public argument. The centralization of these particular mass-mediated communication channels has further reduced opportunities for peripheral voices to break through established media routines and re-set the public agenda. This problem is particularly acute in the United States, where the media monopoly has gone from fifty media firms to five in the past thirty years (Bagdikian, 1983/1997). Viewpoint diversity has steadily shrunk as syndicated material and advertiser pressure overtake investigative journalism and well-staffed newsroom workforces (McChesney, 1999, 2004).

Esther Scott's (2004) study situates these general observations about reduction of viewpoint diversity in the context of Trent Lott's toast. First, Scott identifies how the historical ignorance of reporters contributed to the institutional media missing out on the Lott story. According to Scott, veteran Washington Post writer Tom Edsall explained that his editors and other reporters initially failed to recognize the significance of Lott's comments. As Edsall notes, "I just think that people now see Strom Thurmond as this doddering old guy ... and have no knowledge of the central role he played in southern politics" (as cited in Scott, 2004, p. 11). Having published two books on race and politics, Edsall's specialization gave him a unique angle on Lott's comments, but many reporters apparently did not know the intricacies of Thurmond's role in the 1948 presidential election (Edsall, 1989; Edsall & Edsall, 1992). Second, pack journalism, the tendency for news reporting to become homogenous within and across organizations, also reduces inventional range (Cook, 2000). Scott (2004) quotes reporter Ed O'Keefe on journalistic clubbiness: "if something is newsworthy ... everyone will get it ... if they didn't all get...