Weblogging is not a panacea, particularly in politics

I originally wrote this entry on September 15, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

Some webloggers are prone to the fallacy that weblogging is a panacea, specially in the political arena.

I had to post some comments on this in response to one of Dan Gillmor's recent notes.

Despite some people's conviction (see Howard Rheingold) that cybercommunities could improve democracy, the jury is still out. We had an enormous number of cybercommunities, many of a political kind, in the period just preceding March of 2003 (when compared to what we had before 1995), and yet, a war most unjustified and unpopular at an international scale still took place despite all the weblogs blasting it.

I've written about this issue from different angles before: 1 and 2.