Monitoring, surveillance and empowerment - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 130

'news discoveries' such as those concerning the Monica Lewinsky affair
first appeared on blogs before entering the national or global media. At
the same time, newspapers are increasingly going digital and making
their Web sites 'blog friendly', for instance, by enabling easy linking
and including references to relevant blogs in their articles. The reason is
that almost one-third of the visitors to the Web sites of major American
newspapers come in via weblogs. Perhaps one of the best indications
of the informational power of these personal weblogs is the fact that
in 2005 the Chinese government severely restricted the building of
and access to these blogs (see also Chapter 10 ). And, as will be elab-
orated in Chapter 7 , companies are also discovering the dangers and
potentials of weblogs in their encounters with environmental NGOs
and critical citizen-consumers, designing and implementing 'weblog
strategies'.
At the same time, these powerful blogs are of increasing interest for
state surveillance agencies, especially following 9/11 and the war on ter-
rorism. With the increasing possibilities of individual citizen-consumers
to not only easily access all kind of information but also produce and
disseminate information, power balances are shifting. And so are poli-
cies and practices of (state) monitoring and control. Surveillance of the
Internet has become in most countries one of the fastest-growing activ-
ities of secret and intelligence services, police forces and other state
organisations. Regularly, discussions emerge in OECD countries on
the necessity of more strict governmental regulation of weblogs, or -
alternatively - calls for a civilisation process of webloggers, for internal
codes or for stronger webmaster control.
The question is of course whether this major influence of weblogs
will be there to stay. How sustainable is the revolutionary change that
weblogs are bringing at the moment to the monitoring and media land-
scape? With the skyrocketing of the number of weblogs, an overkill of
information is within reach or already present, and the number of
readers per weblog is drastically reducing. Personal weblogs have a
low survival rate after three months; the large majority have become
inactive by then. But, at the same time, there is a tendency for weblogs
to become more focused and specific, addressing and being visited by
smaller, more carefully targeted groups and organisations. One can
expect that the major influence of the weblog phenomenon on (envi-
ronmental) governance will remain, but that it will be a limited number
of these more focused weblogs that account for this influence.