Dial-A-Blog, Numéro Indigo?

Peering into the EU political blogsphere, one can’t help but find an in-genuine feature or some sad absurdity when you look closely at a great many of them. While there are some really good and original ones out there, almost any of the blogs found looking for a substantive discussion on political, budgetary, economic, “macro-level” social issues, and international relations, one finds the type of blog funded by commissions, commission or government funded institutions, and so forth. I can’t help but ask where the enthusiasm is if it requires a committee, a grant, and a dance on the fine line between a government outreach website, and something trying very hard to look creative and genuine only to seem academic.

Outcome?: one hell of a sedative, and in most cases less traffic than gonzo blogs like this one which is funded by nothing, isn’t networked to much of anything, let alone anything official, and doesn’t require interns, employees, or anything else. It’s as though they never heard of the invisible hand.

Some absurdly appear to be about the EU, but are little more that a compilation of news feeds about the UN. While most of these are in fact supposed to operate as a dialogue mechanism for think-tanks and journals, it looks like something did because it was suggested a blog was something a respectable operation could not do without, over some sort of social anxiety one had to do – not seeming to have wanted to do.

Nothing could be further from the truth. If the fabulous brainiacs involved in a think-tank end up being characterized by a depressing looking thing that captures less interest than a monthly newsletter, I don’t see what good it does. Oddly enough it’s the authors and operators themselves, who are probably interns or the least-senior employees that provide for far more provocative and interesting reading on their own blogs – which is to say that this is not the kind of thing one can program and buy in the way so many European social and development efforts are engineered, while others still have parenthetical relationships to semi-publicly funded entities, press operations, but have distinctly political goals.

In the EU there isn’t much of a ‘line’ left between the roles of those speaking on behalf of government, private political players, universities, and the individuals who write for them. One already sees that most anyone under 25 can’t understand their distinct state roles, and just why separation produces its’ own transparency.

It won’t be long for that sort of society to assume everything they hear or read comes from the same ‘giant it’ whose motives will be so entirely opaque that people will give up on asking what their motives and intentions are. Something like Oceania, here we come...