goffchile:

I would argue that there *are* significant entry barriers–owning a computer, internet access, and time being huge

I think the latter is by far the most important. In more or less every city, the availability of Internet terminals in public schools and public libraries means that not owning your own PC, or not being able to afford home Internet access, is no longer a significant barrier to web-based applications like blogging. Working 60 hours a week at three different jobs, on the other hand, is.

Besides the barriers on the supply-side, the other important concern (which a lot of feminist bloggers, for example, have raised) is on the demand-side. As many millions of blogs as there may be, attention in blogging is structured much more hierarchically than blog boosters are inclined to acknowledge, and that hierarchical structure much more closely reflects traditional social hierarchy than they care to admit (actually, often, a hyperthyroidic version of traditional social hierarchy, because straight white male educated professional “A-list” bloggers have, so far, been subjected to critical scrutiny far less than straight white male educated professional “MSM” outfits).

Unfortunately being able to speak is fairly irrelevant, from the standpoint of politics or civil society, if nobody hears what you have to say, or nobody takes it seriously enough to consider it worth listening to. I think that blogs are a move in the right direction — and one which will become increasingly important with time — but there’s a long walk down and a long, hard slog ahead between that mountaintop to the Promised Land.

I should say that in the medium to long term, actually, I think that what will be far more important than any blogger’s ability to show up on the mainstream media’s radar, or even to break through into “A-list” bloggers’ boys’ club mutual linking society, is that blogs are making it much easier for writers with a distinctive view to simply bypass broadcasting prominence and to reach a smaller, mostly self-selected audience with more narrowly focused interests. As people change their habits of reading, conversing, and news-gathering, broadcast success will become less and less relevant, and deadlocked mainstream consensuses will be shifted because, by nearly imperceptible steps, the ground collapses out from under them, not because some mighty force erupts up through them. But, again, we’re still a long way from that, and I think that part of the process of getting to that will involve recognizing how far we are from it and consciously changing our tools and our habits (in both reading and writing) to work towards traversing the gap.