The Internet and global interconnectivity, while often taken for granted, has changed the face of social reality. Weblogs, more commonly known as blogs, have emerged and in many ways manifest both extremes of positive and negative potential.
Because blogs have tremendous potential to be used either for good or ill, they could be dubbed a new avatar of a power group supplementing the old. The modern expression of the separation of powers in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches became known as the three estates, later to be followed by a “fourth estate” in the form of the media.
The designation has often been contested simply because the media does not implement policy or mandate particular activity, yet these criticisms miss the larger point. The essence of “estates” as used here refers to sources of power.
When the term “fourth estate” was coined by Edmund Burke and referred to by Thomas Carlyle, their astute observation was that the press had come to wield an equal or occasionally greater power to influence policy than the original three state powers.
The Internet multiplied this power, providing the possibility for previously unheard voices to gain an audience as well as provide another check on the power of the other estates. This led me in 2007 to designate blogs as the fifth estate.
