'Keeping it real' - or just an exercise in making it easier to govern? Media trainings, life events, the bloggosphere, and the e-citizen

Abstract

This paper takes a political communications approach to the analysis of a selected range of Australian and international life-event portals and politicians’ weblogs. It develops an argument about the potentially reductive elements of some new online practices initiated by government, political parties and citizens, working from the concept of the “downsizing” of democracy which Crenson and Ginsberg (2002) argue, in more general terms, is the effect of the “privatising” of US citizens. The paper asks : first, how portals and political weblogs, as points of mediation, form the capacities of the e-citizen and the e-representative ; second, whether the capacities formed are useful ones for technologically-enhanced democratic practices ; and last, whether democracy is “scaled down” by taking the approaches of audience address frequently deployed in “apolitical” forms of media infotainment.