Opposite Ends: Celebrity Gossip and Iraqi Blogs' Impact on the Public Sphere

The internet has a long history of promises of reviving and spreading democracy. One of the ways in which it does this is through the invigoration of the public sphere, which some critics see as necessary for a healthy democracy (McNair, 2006: 135). Aspects of the internet and surrounding technology and software contribute to the promise of the internets potential as a public sphere. First, data storage and recovery introduce usually unavailable information into political discussion; second, the internet, due to its nature as a network, allows discussion between people in all corners of the globe; and third, it has the capacity to ‘make everyone a publisher’, which gives citizens a voice they have not felt that they had in the past (Papacharissi, 2002: 9 and Simon, 2002: vii). It is these qualities of the internet that have enabled the rise of participatory culture and blogging, which has impacted the public sphere by disrupting old paradigms of power and entrenching new mechanisms of control. This essay aims to suggest how participatory culture has impacted on the public sphere by focusing on two blogs that represent different ends of the blogging spectrum. The first one is celebrity gossip blog PerezHilton.com by self-titled ‘Queen of Media’ Perez Hilton aka Mario Lavandeira (PerezHilton.com, 2007). The second blog is a political opinion blog called In the Middle by an Iraqi, Raed Jarrar, who lives in the United States (In the Middle, 2007). The reason why I have chosen to focus on two very different blogs is to demonstrate how participatory culture impacts the public sphere through the whole blogosphere, not just the blogs that are overtly political, and suggest that even blogs that seem apolitical are actually engaged in politics (see Jenkins, 2006). This will be explained more fully later. However, before I can start to look at how participatory culture has affected the public sphere, the terms participatory culture and public sphere need explanation.