(Allison Martin sits in a coffee shop with a laptop displaying her blog Tuesday June 28, 2005 in downtown Chicago. Blogs' place in democracy was the center of discussion at a recent Yale University debate. by M. Spencer Green, AP Photo)by Paige Dearing
The Huffington Post reported on the recent student debate on blogging’s effect on democracy at Yale University. The Yale Political Union agreed, 33 to 22, that blogs are good for democracy.
Arguments ranged from discussing the rise of single-issue campaigning to the deconstruction of complex issues. Leah Anthony Libresco spoke on how a well-informed citizenry is necessary for a free state, with a focus on First Amendment rights, and was one of the four speeches Huffington Post posted to their blog.
Libresco reasoned that blogs improve democracy because they “giv[e] ordinary citizens access to the ideas they care most about” and noted that blogs' “real power lies in their ability to provide broad overviews of the issues at stake and quick links for citizen activists," according to the Huffingtonpost.com post.
She recounted a visit to a high school where she asked students to rank the Bill of Rights' amendments in order of importance. She said one group placed the Second Amendment as number one, because they believed that no one cared or listened to what they said.
Blogs empower citizens to share their opinions with friends and politicians, she said. These words or opinions would otherwise be left out of mainstream coverage, but posting them online makes them readily available, and sometimes easily found with the help of search engines.
Read all of Libresco's speech here.
Does this make you cherish your First Amendment rights more because you have an effective and far-reaching medium to communicate your opinons? Or if not cherish them more, at least make free speech/free press rights more relevant to the average American’s life than in the past?
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