After Bloggforum‘s last panel debate of the day, one of the SVT24 Direkt cameramen, who earlier had commented on how he thought the hand-drawn Bloggforum signs looked cool, That retro look was because of printer toner issues, not intentional. came up to me and said (in Swedish) something like “You know, we should write a blog about all the shit we have to listen to for our work.” What an excellent idea, I thought. Now that’s a media blog I’d love to read. (No, I don’t think he was being that sarcastic.)

More Bloggforum thoughts to follow; it’s just been a slow start to the day here.Later, at après-forum drinks, Dagens Nyheter‘s Nils Öhman in passing mentioned a very interesting point that is obvious in retrospect but which I had never actually heard articulated: That the variety of political opinions expressed in a blogosphere tends to be heavily influenced by the nature of the political system the blogosphere belongs to.

For some reason, I had always assumed that since blogs are inherently individualistic pursuits, their political opinions would resist falling in line behind the larger cleavages that define the home polity. They would provide a wealth of viewpoints, supplanting the limited number of official party stances, which after all are wrought from a need for a consensus large enought to justify the investment on party machinery. This was supposed to be the promise of blogs.

I assumed all this even though it is blatantly not the case in the US, where bloggers have largely ended up identifying themselves as liberal (=Democrat) or conservative (=Republican), with a smattering of libertarians on the side. Bloggers’ loyalties have tended to collapse to the options generated by the first-past-the-post electoral system in place there, which is necessarily empoverishing.

In Sweden, a multiparty system is fostering a truly fragmented political blogging landscape. Over the past few months, bloggers from the smaller parties have swelled the ranks, and what’s interesting is that these bloggers’ political opinions not only differ within party alliances, they also tend to break rank within parties themselves. Blogging, then, is being used as a collaborative tool to evolve party stances, at least among the parties’ Young Turks. (As examples, look at the variety in the responses by the left to the formation of the Feminist Initiative, or Johan Norberg‘s open flirting with the Center Party.)

Unlike in the US, I get the feeling that Swedish bloggers are not being continually urged towards up-or-down, yay-or-nay, with-us-or-against-us bottom lines, because a proportional-representation electoral system does not demand it. It’s as if the gap between Republican and Democrat is too large to beat, and so American bloggers have opted to join one or the other. In Sweden, no such sacrifices for the sake of the greater good are needed.