Quite simply, the blogosphere exists because it fills a need. It was not brought into being by fiat; it evolved through the accumulation of individual acts. The many people who find it worth their investment in time and effort to create blog content surely do it because they find it fills a need for expression, for giving voice to their thoughts, in a way the previous outlets available to them did not. So, too, does the blogosphere fill a need for those who read the content, and participate in discussion by adding their comments. In this sense, then, the blogosphere represents a vox populi the technology did not determine, but did, instead, facilitate. This is clearly a free market perspective on the blogosphere; the author finds it the most satisfying understanding of it.

Probably the critical theorists, as a school of thought, would be discomfited by the notion that a blatantly commercial marketplace in communication technology has facilitated the evolution of a genre of computer-mediated communication (viz., blogs) with such a relentlessly individualist ethos,















yet having such a clear public benefit. Probably they would not have expected that a genre with such inconsequential roots (viz., personal web pages) could have opened up public discourse to a collective level only considered a theoretical ideal. Probably they would have assumed that even an approximation of that ideal discourse could come into being only through some sort of concerted political action, not through the accumulation of voluntary interactions in a decentralized, unmanaged virtual space. Yet, that is precisely what has happened.

This author is inclined to think that social structures which evolve through the voluntary interactions and exchanges among people—such as the blogosphere—tend in general to be more beneficial than structures created through the deliberate exercise of power, however well-intentioned—such as regulatory bureaucracies. That idea cannot be fully explored here. For our purposes, we can simply note that the blogosphere would seem to be a near-perfect instantiation of the ideal discourse.