From an interview with Rebecca MacKinnon in the book Blog!: How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture:

But we are also hoping that people will care about those in other countries more if they can get a better insight into what it is like to be Egyptian or Vietnamese. As Hoder likes to put it, if people are able to hear the individual voices and the personalities of Iranian bloggers maybe they will be a little less likely to support a war of regime change against Iran. It might be harder for a population to be demonized when there are so many different voices coming out of the country.

In the past, if you wanted to know what an ordinary Iranian thinks and you didn’t happen to know any Iranians and you lived in Iowa, you had to rely on the appearance of quotes or sound bites from Iranians on CNN or in the New York Times. You had no other way of finding out what it is like to be an Iranian or what an Iranian thinks about what is going on in the world. But now you can go directly to the blog of an Iranian and you can hear this voice saying, “I’m a twenty-two-year-old Iranian engineering student and here’s what I think about my government, and here’s what I think about what the United States is doing, and here’s what I think about sex and dating and fasion” and you start seeing complex people that you didn’t have access to before.

I guess the slightly idealistic hope is that enabling greater access among peoples from vastly different cultures might make a difference. It may be naive, it may be that the cacophony is too great, it may be that people genuinely don’t care. But we want to create a vehicle through which those who might want to care can find people, can find voices, can find alternative viewpoints, can find more fine-graned individual personalities and perspectives more easily and more meaningfully than is currently the case.

From Joshua Levy who started the Bronx Blog Project, which encourages ESL students in the Bronx to blog about their lives and communities.

Even if you’re a student like those that I’m working with whose only stated need is to talk to their family more often, you might find that the accessibility and ease of blogging opens people up to the larger world of social computing. One student showed me the pictures of her and her friends that her friend emailed her. I told her she could put those pictures up on her blog; she didn’t realize this and was excited to hear it. Blogs are flexible that way; they can help you whether you want to communicate to a group of ten friends or write a political manifesto to the masses. I guess I’m hoping my students will do a little of both.