A point about mobilization...

Peter wrote:

As for mobilisation, I wonder whether you would have seen the vast crowds coming out for Kerry and Bush without the ability to inform large numbers of people so quickly that an event was taking place - surely impossible without email?

The thing about large numbers of people appearing at these rallies is that they're taking place (many of them, at least) in small towns. Having worked at a small-town paper for a while during the heat of the election, I can assure you that if a presidential candidate comes anywhere Small Town, Swing State, local papers and TV stations are going to be all over it (and, incidentally, they're also going to be overwhelmingly positive in their coverage, no matter which candidate it is). And in places like central Pennsylvania and northeast Ohio, that's how people get their news. If you want to reach voters in those places and get them to show up at your rally, you don't use e-mail as your primary communication device.

Do they give out lotto numbers, too?

In 2,000 Bimber and Davis made four predictions about the internet and future elections:

1. The Internet...will solidify as a form of niche communication directed at
highly specific audiences.
2. The Internet will offer campaigns a new and highly effective tool
formobilizing activists.
3. Citizens who are politically interpreted and active increasingly
will utilize the Internet as a vehicle for satisfying their need for information
andsupport.
4. The Internet will not produce the mobilization of voters long predicted.

4 out of 4 isn't bad. Here in 2005, there's little debate to be had about the first three, but it's that last one that I bet people will still belabor. "But look at the voter turnout! Look at the energy people poured into the election! Look at all the people who mobilized last year!"

The Internet did not produce that mobilization; it merely gave people who were highly energized already an outlet and an organizational tool.

This is going to be a common theme for me, but I might as well say it: I'm not yet ready to give up on point No. 4, but so far it just hasn't happened. Bimber and Davis say it won't happen, and the logical side of me agrees with them. I'd like for them to be wrong, but it just sorta flies in the face of the history of this country and its people to believe that our population could ever be as mobilized and motivated to participate in the electoral process as the political junkies would like them to be.

Meandering introductions

It’s awkward to start a blog, even when you know three-dozen other people are embarking on the exact same task. Quickly, I suspect, we’ll degenerate into blog cliques, never reading more than five or six of our classmates’ endeavors once we’ve identified the voices we’d like to hear from more, if we even get past just looking at our friends’. Because that’s how blogs work, for those who visit them daily; to avoid going insane staring into the face of the unknown, teeming mass of the blogosphere, we are forced to draw seemingly random but essential lines between the blogs we read and those we just don’t have time for. I suspect this group will be no different. It’s the second-grade playground all over again, as far a cry from a democratic system as it’s possible to be. The North Korea of political discourse.

Introductions and off-handed references to North Korea out of the way, what is a blog?

A poster at a journalism message board likes to refer to them as “The Flavor of the Week at the Panicked Publishers 31 Flavors store,” referring in general to some corporate media organizations’ rush to grab hip, young readers who spend all their time basking in the warm glow of these newfangled glorified typewriters.

They’re the flavor du jour among producers and editors who are desperately seeking to cash in on the near-anarchic energy of the Web; these people want to harness that energy into better ratings and higher circulation for the old-guard media they are charged with protecting and evolving at the same time. That’s how we get the laughably out of touch blog update on CNN, and why so many newspapers are piling on new responsibilities for their under-30 staff members, who suddenly find that blogging has become part of their job description. The old guard has been frightened into the if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em mentality, and the results may be more disastrous to the credibility of these outlets than anything Jayson Blair or Dan Rather could have done on their worst days.

I am a firm believer in both the “old” and “new” media. The Internet has amazing possibilities that we’re just beginning to tap into, and many brilliant and creative minds are working toward new developments we can’t even imagine. Joe Trippi, who projects himself as one of the most idealistic believers in the power of the Internet to mobilize voters, called the Dean campaign’s revolutionary use of the Internet “nothing less than the first shot in America’s second revolution.” I hope to God he’s even half right.

But right now? Show me a blog that goes a single day without critiquing, criticizing, linking to, ranting against, poking fun at or simply rehashing a so-called mainstream media site. With a few notable exceptions (an important disclaimer), the denizens of the blogosphere are parasites, unable so far to stand on their own two feet, so to speak, and find a voice independent of the mainstream media they spend so much time decrying.

If the old media were performing up to the ideal standards they’ve never quite reached, at least half of the most popular blogs would have nothing to post about. It’s not the medium that matters, folks, its the content.

3-2-1... contact

Just testing out assorted ways to post to this lovely thing. Obviously, this works.


More by Tuesday.