It is said if you don’t vote, you get the government you deserve. In other words, exercise your democratic right or suffer the consequences.

The same can now be said for having a voice in social media, particularly blogging. If you don’t create content, you have willingly issued your own gag order. Rest assured, in the cacophony of “citizen journalism,” someone more shrill and with lesser intellect will take your spot.

I’ve decided my paternal grandfather, Douglas Vincent Lacombe, was the original blogger. Why do I engage in such revisionist history? Because I see blogging as an ideology as much as an activity.

Gramps, rest his soul, was a journalist, PR pioneer, and j-school teacher in Atlantic Canada in the 40s and 50s. He understood how to tell a story and how to get that story out. At home we called them “sermons” as he delighted in proselytizing around the dinner table regarding his socioeconomic and political views.

Thankfully the sermons weren’t just for us. Gramps knew better than most how to take full advantage of the rights afforded him by the Moncton Times and Transcript and other journals to advance his views on a wide variety of subjects. In innumerable Letters to the Editor (we called them “poison pen letters”) and Op-Ed pieces, Gramps argued passionately for a better Canada. Whether I always agreed or not is immaterial, it was the act of being an engaged citizen that inspired me then and inspires me now, some seven years after his passing at the age of 92.

Consider this excerpt from a 1992 Letter to the Editor of the Times and Transcript:  “Premier Don Getty of Alberta is being criticized for his stand that bilingualism, as with religious and other freedoms, should not be entrenched in law. Joe Clark ‘cringes’ at Mr. Getty’s views … Our politicians sure have double standards. No wonder Canadians do not trust them. Where were they when Quebec killed bilingualism? When Bill 101 was enacted in Quebec?”

As a media wonk, one of my favorite blogs is themediamanager.com by the Vancouver Sun’s Kirk Lapointe. In an early 2009 post entitled “What I learned in my first blogging year”, Lapointe stated:

“Only opinions attract opinion. My blog suffered repeatedly when I wouldn’t/couldn’t/didn’t take a stand. When I evaluated (instead of echoed) positions or research, user comments increased. Still, my overall reticence yielded a poor traffic-to-comment ratio. Learning: You have to add value and that often means staking ground.”

Does digital participation really matter to democracy, or is it simply a case of techno- utopianism? In the age of crumbling media empires, I say it matters deeply. In 2008 journalist/ blogger Arianna Huffington argued at the Yale Political Union for the resolution “Blogs Are Good For Democracy”, which passed 33-22 although not without spirited debate.

More recently Barrett Sheridan, a journalist at Newsweek wrote:

“There aren’t many ideas that unite former U.S. president George W. Bush and his successor, Barack Obama. But one safe topic for conversation would be Internet freedom and the power of technology to foment democratic revolutions. In mid-April Bush welcomed to his new think tank in Texas six dissidents who used Web tools to oppose dictatorships, applauding them as examples ‘of how the Internet can be effectively used to advance the freedom agenda.’ Obama, meanwhile, has made Internet freedom a centerpiece of his foreign policy, and in a speech in Beijing late last year hailed ‘access to information’ as a ‘universal right.’ ”

In 2000 I taught my grandfather, aged 89, to use email. His frail hands shaking, they steadied to the familiarity of the QWERTY keyboard as he took to the machine with the ease of  someone who had spent long hours on the Smith-Corona. We corresponded this way regularly until his death in 2003.

I’m confident if he were alive today he would take up blogging. But really, he was at it all along, long before the word was invented, he just used different “software”.

In any case, he was my original blogger, and he set a good example.

As usual, send me your feedback on Twitter at @dblacombe or via e-mail doug@communicatto.com.

Doug Lacombe is president of Calgary social media agency communicatto.

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