The Rise of the Fifth Estate: Social Media and Blogging in Australian Politics
By Greg Jericho
Scribe, $29.95, pp 313
ISBN 9781921844935

The amount of virtual ink spilled by Australia’s bloggers and tweeters is truly astonishing, especially since it is by no means clear that they have achieved much. As Greg Jericho notes in this interesting, if flawed, study, a key problem in talking about the blogosphere is that it is an amorphous creature, a moving labyrinth stretching from informed, careful contributors to wacko conspiracy theorists, with a lot of mediocrity in between.