Empowering Latinos. Weblogs as Tools of Democracy in the United States (eBook)
Just a little over ten years ago, the first website became
accessible to the public and even though the World Wide Web of
today is still in its teens, it has become a phenomenon of
virtually global impact. By the mid 1990s, people started to
discover the joys of online communication via socalled weblogs or
blogs, but blogs really evolved at the turn of the millennium, when
the international blogosphere virtually exploded. Anyone could
create one, anyone could participate in one, and everyone had at
least heard of one. Blogs revolutionized online communication by
creating worldwide communities of technology nerds, ambitious
writers, and simply those who found an outlet for their
exhibitionist tendencies. Decades earlier, in 1981, renowned German
philosopher and sociological theorist Jürgen Habermas published his
seminal work Theory of Communicative Action, in which he formulates
a theoretical framework for societal progress achieved through
communication. In the United States of today, progress and the
means of communication are inherently White, in fact knowledge and
societal power are White. This research is designed to look at the
question of democratic empowerment among the Latino minority, this
is, whether weblogs provide the Latino immigrant community with
means to connect, exchange information, and thus gain social and
political influence by the power of knowledge. Is it possible for
Latinos in the U.S. to use the medium of weblogs according to
Habermas' theory and change the distribution of knowledge and
power in American society Habermas' approach will be described
as the theoretical framework for this research paper. It will then
be determined how the Latino community in the U.S. could or could
not use the weblog as a tool of empowerment. Seminar paper aus dem
Jahr 2005 im Fachbereich Amerikanistik - Kultur und Landeskunde,
Note: 1,0, - (Duke University), Sprache: Englisch.
