I'm not sure exactly how valuable a resource blogs and blogging are to democratic deliberation and debate. It's probably too early to form a confident judgement. But I do think they are such a resource and so I disagree with what Oliver Kamm says in this post:
[T]he medium overall impoverishes our democracy. So far from being "democratic and egalitarian", the proliferation of political blogs narrows the range of opinion presented in the public square, to the extent that blogs are taken seriously as an intermediary for debate.Oliver's argument (following Cass Sunstein) seems to be that, despite allowing a greater number of voices and range and variety of opinion, the overall effect of blogs is to lead people to look for, and stick with, the ideas and arguments with which they're comfortable, so that what you get is not a genuine conversation but an echo chamber, with participants standing firm on fixed positions and sometimes indulging in abuse, rather than engaging with one another in a thoughtful way.
I think this mixes up different things. If blogs and blogging create a wider and freer space for public argument, then that is a clear good, and the view that it encourages people simply to stay with what they know and like needs to be supported by some evidence. Given how much of blogging consists of bloggers and commenters taking issue with one another, the suggestion is implausible to me that they're less exposed than they would otherwise be - without the blogosphere - to opinions different from their own. Moreover, I think the assumption that people are more open to competing views when they read a newspaper, watch TV, etc. than they are when reading material on the Internet is also ungrounded, pending some evidence to this effect.
At the same time, Oliver is plainly right that blogging debate - as is evident at Comment is Free but on many other sites as well - includes a lot that isn't conducive to deliberation, in a good meaning of that word, or to open-minded consideration of the views of others. It is striking how far modes of address and argument are tolerated in the blogosphere that would not be in a seminar or democratic public meeting. Not only would the chair intervene. Against some of the excesses now taken as par for the course in blogospheric debate it is probable there would be a more collectively expressed disapproval. Why the two cultures of public argument, in the real world and the virtual one, have diverged to the extent they have is a question I won't try to answer here, except to say that I'm not convinced that it's due to the anonymity of many of the participants.
But if, from a democratic point of view, there is this shortcoming of debate on the blogs, it needs to be dealt with practically by trying to improve the culture of Internet discussion. There is nothing about the medium as such, about the sheer availability of this new space for debate, one open to much larger numbers of people and to every point of view, that impoverishes democracy.