Participant: Monique Vandresen
Format: Poster and Conversation
Themes: recursion, praxis

One of the realities of our day and age is that as communication and media prosper, discourse is experienced in a lot more places. Blogs provide a way for readers to examine environmental issues more completely and to form their own positions. The biggest green blogs now customarily attract more readers than most environmentally oriented print magazines. The free-form exchange among these bloggers and their readers has become an central part of the public dialog on environmental matters. Blogs are becoming a significant form of struggle for eco-friendly social equality and building of identities.

In this paper, five outstanding Blogs are examined, using Gregory Bateson’s “The Roots of Ecological Crisis,” in order to evaluate this relatively new media and its role in the larger needed ecological change. The aim is to discuss a present-day social phenomenon which is relevant to concerns of social process and the desires of many to change it. Blogs and traditional media can be analyzed as aspects of a social ecology. Suggests that new social movements and their blogs are a main factor in the reordering of the development debate and an important instrument on the search for alternatives to development. New social movements using the blogosphere challenge the semi—democratic political culture and bring new values, perspectives, methods and strategies to the political arena (Mainwaring and Viola, 1984).