PVI. dKos as Figure

Consider, for a moment, the example of a single blog, the “Daily Kos.” "dKos" actually manages to exemplify (and symptomize) at once so many of the actual features, cultural practices, and best hopes of the wider "blogosphere" imagined as a radically democratizing force that I think it has come to function as a characteristic figure through which to think about social software in its emancipatory and radically democratic registers more generally.

Created in 2002 by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, Daily Kos is the most widely read and arguably the most influential American political blog at the time of this writing. The site presently attracts nearly half a million readers a day. Although Moulitsas was the creator and remains the proprietor of the blog, it is fair to say that he is one of countless collaborators in the ongoing development and ramification of the Daily Kos as a discursive space and online culture.

Quite a lot of the distinctive flavor and value of the Daily Kos as a community and meta-blogspace arose as a direct and, as it happens, unintended consequence of Moulitsas’ choice to implement dKos through recourse to a web application called “Scoop” in which the comments of readers who participate in the site are foregrounded more than is usually the case in typical blogging software.

Registered participants can create “Diaries” that function somewhat like stripped-down blogs within the blog. These texts are then ranked by other registered users of the site. If a Diary attracts enough positive attention it acquires the status of a “Recommended” text and is given a special prominence for a time (and since several Diaries can sometimes arrive on the scene each minute such prominence provides a chance at a wider readership that could never be assured them otherwise).

This conspicuously collaborative character of the dKos online culture extends to other aspects and activities of the site as well. The Daily Kos archives a host of permanent articles and essays, glossaries of terms, historical sketches, candidate profiles, talking points on issues of the day, tactical recommendations and the like, for example, all gathered in a wiki under the title of the “dKospedia,” an information resource to which registered users make the bulk of the contributions as well as editing this content for accuracy and clarity on an ongoing basis.

And in the 2004 Election Cycle, users of (both contributors to and readers of) the Daily Kos contributed approximately half a million dollars through the site and on the basis of its recommendations to various Democratic candidates. The sheer volume of money raised in this way, mostly via small contributions across the sprawling diffuse blog-coordinated network, as well as the strategic sophistication that directed its subsequent distribution still seem an ongoing provocation to established political authorities and received political assumptions.

Together with the use of social software to organize meetings, protests, activist campaigns, petitions, and the like, and to co-ordinate extraordinarily rapid responses to current events and mainstream media commentary, this aggregation of small campaign contributions to raise vast sums of money has come to be described as the mobilization of the “Netroots” (a play on the figure of “grassroots” to elicit the power of its participatory politics). No less important are the emerging forms of blog-facilitated muckraking journalism (for which the inevitable coinage “blograking” instantly arose to capture the practice), including the lightning-quick and viral pseudonymous diffusion of gossip, leaks, misinformation, protests, and whistle-blowing online, as well as emerging collaborative and aggregative alternatives to conventional editing, fact-checking, assessment, and reputation-formation.

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