Sunny at Pickled Politics makes the following interesting point about blogging and elitism, which I think is instructive even though I wonder whether it is on point:
Firstly, I think the level of debate on the blogosphere makes it very difficult for academics, anlysts, think-tanks and other NGOs to get involved. There’s too much “drive-by commenting” and people just want to spout abuse because that’s the culture we’ve developed. I believe this needs to change if the British blogosphere is to attract heavy-weights who can feed into constructive dialogue, as is the case a lot in the United States. I’m not saying the Americans do it better but I definitely think the level of debate there is way better (apart from the likes of LGF, Michelle Malkin and sometimes even Daily Kos) because more academics, analysts, policy people get involved.
Secondly, there’s also a fair bit of elitism amongst such organisations, who feel that testing their ideas amongst the masses serves no purpose and they should concentrate solely on lobbying. To an extent I can see their point since resources are usually quite stretched.
But sometimes I get the feeling they don’t want to have that debate because they’re worried it might challenge their own methodology / ideas. It may partly be because they don’t see a constructive debate happening (so it becomes a chicken and egg situation). But unless we get more people working at grass-roots, doing research or developing policy actually engaging with others on their ideas, it means intellectual stagnation. And I see this happening a lot on the left on areas like race, religion, feminism, environment, migration etc - where the same ideas from 20 years ago are being recycled.
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