APALSA event

Adding Asian-American Voices to the Political Blogosphere - Gwen Hochman

     This morning I attended the APALSA panel on the potential impact of blogging on Asian-American political participation.  The panelists included Erik Hananoki, a blogger previously employed by Al Franken; C.N. Le, a UMass Sociology professor who blogs about Asian-American social issues; and Phil Yu, creator of the popular pop culture commentary blog AngryAsianMan.com.  The panelists generally agreed that blogs have the potential to affect political change; Erik cited the Dean campaign as everybody’s favorite example of grass roots blogging, and the format of blogs (updating quickly, often engaging in dialogue with comment from readers and other blogs) was cited as encouraging a new level of reader participation.
     A particularly interesting point in the panel came when an audience member directly confronted the panelists with Sonnenstein’s argument about the possible detrimental effect of further fragmentation and balkanization of viewpoints that may result from the internet and blogging.  C.N. pointed out that this effect was already happening before the internet, and the panelists uniformly insisted that adding more voices, even if they did not represent the mainstream, was good thing.  This belief seemed somewhat contingent on the fact that Asian-Americans generally have lacked representation in political dialogue, and it is unclear how far the “adding voices outweighs unity/objectivity concerns” argument could extend beyond the specific case of the Asian-American community or other groups for whom lack of representation of any kind is the most pressing concern.
     Relatedly, Phil Yu’s AngryAsianMan blog seems to suggest that the goals of providing “objective” news or information and broadcasting newer, opinionated voices may not actually be irreconcilable.  Phil’s blog is openly left-leaning, and as evidenced by his obvious discomfort with expressing himself in person, it provides an outlet for a political voice that otherwise might not be heard.  At the same time, however, Phil’s blog provides an aggregated source for news stories of interest to the Asian-American community and which are largely excluded from the traditional news media; even readers with differing political views have voiced appreciation of that aspect of his blog.  Perhaps, as Phil suggests, just getting a group of previously uninvolved people, like most Asian Americans, interested in a subject and blogging or reading about it is itself a contribution to the political process, regardless of what kind of action may or may not follow.