It's a start

Lawmakers may be bad at getting on that whole Internet bandwagon, as Johnson discusses in frightening detail, but at least someone in that part of town is getting it right. Last month, the Congressional Research Service announced that it would be putting its reports online for the public to search, capping a long campaign by open-government advocates.

My general theory behind pretty much everything we've read this semester is that it takes baby steps to get the Internet into everyone's lives, especially when you're dealing with politicians who may not be so quick on the technological uptake. Putting the CRS reports on the Web is a small step, but the more often a lawmaker associates aspects of his political life (such as looking up a report) with the Web, the more likely he will be to adopt new technologies.

Buckeye bungle

Because I went to college in northeast Ohio, this week's reading had me thinking back to what I remembered of youth-oriented GOTV efforts in the area I went to school in.

During my sophomore year--2000--a rumor circulated that the small campus had been divided among four of the city's precincts to prohibit the students of the college, temporary residents of the town, from having too much say in local politics. I never found out if that rumor was true, but I did manage to strike down another rumor that had been making the rounds: That students couldn't register to vote in Ohio. While a lot of states have or are thinking about laws forbidding out-of-states students from registering as voters in their school states, Ohio isn't one of them, as this Columbus Dispatch piece explains. But no one ever stood outside our dining hall or peppered our cars with pamphlets telling us to switch our registration from, say, a place like D.C. to a state that matters electorally.

(I was--and still am--registered in Pennsylvania, so it didn't so much matter for me, one swing state for another.)

In 2000, my college, which Lynne Cheney once referred to as the most politically correct college in the country, was heavily pro-Nader; I wish I'd been in touch with enough people still there last year to tell you what happened in 2004. But if every vote mattered in Ohio in 2000 and 2004, surely the 18-22-year-old temporary residents of Ohio ought to count for something. Surely, if someone had made it their priority to convince even half of the college students in the state to register in Ohio, the election could have turned out differently. Heck, most of them would have been registering for the first time, anyway.

The Web is often most effective as a GOTV tool for young voters, just like the ones you find on your average college campus. And, judging by the politics of my college and many of those nearby, there are a fair number of left-leaning kids on these campuses who, had they been organized better, could have been a factor in swinging the state for Kerry. There's no reason save perhaps lack of vision that Democrats in Ohio weren't as organized as the Amway-like Republicans, as so many of our readings pointed out this week ad nauseum. Now just imagine what effect that mind-meld mentality could have had on college students.

On the other hand, what might have happened had hundreds and thousands of newly registered young voters then turned their attention toward GOTV efforts in their adopted towns? Would it have been like the Deaniacs in Iowa, or would a real dialogue have opened up between energized students and maybe not-so-energized adults? Would people who hated the presence of drunken college students in their town have turned away from a particular candidate just because some of those students went door to door suggesting they vote for Candidate X?

On yet another hand, it's not like Ohio was lacking in volunteers anyway.

Amway Republicans

This is so not a class post, but I had to share the light that went off in my head just now

Reading over some class blogs this afternoon and stewing over the narrowcasting concept I had the nagging feeling that I'd heard the Amway-politics line somewhere before. And then it hit me! In Aaron Sorkin's rough draft of "The West Wing," a film also known as "American President," poor Richard Dreyfuss is cast in the unfortunate role of crabby Republican who picks on the president's girlfriend. About two-thirds of the way through the film, the following scene occurs as Michael Douglass watches a Dreyfuss speech:

President Andrew Shepherd: Wait, wait, here comes my favorite part.
Bob Rumson: My name is Bob Rumson, and I'm running for President!
President Andrew Shepherd: Sure glad he cleared that up, 'cause those people were about to buy some Amway products!

Now, Amway's always freaked me out just a bit. And Republican politics have always freaked me out a bit more. But the combination of the two? Yikes.


Another observation: Having looked at the most recent posts on most of the blogs for class, I found two distinct categories: Those who took the week off from blogging, and those who wrote about the Amway/narrowcasting concept. I'm all for less work in class and everything, but it's tough to muster the desire to comment when we're all saying the same thing!

Who loves you more?

Wow. Wow.

I don't think I've ever seen anything quite as exploitive as the Schiavo family's e-mail list being sold for conservative causes. And that's really saying something in the context of that entire fiasco.

Is this yet another notch in the difference between Republicans and Democrats? Republicans, it seems, don't think twice about sharing their e-mails with like-minded causes and candidates, as we saw when Bush shared his content with the RNC. We've been ragging on the Democrats such as Kerry and Dean for not being so smart when writing their privacy policies and thus keeping their lists to themselves.

But is it possible the difference is more philosophical? Democrats are "too stupid" to write a privacy policy that allows content sharing, but the Schiavo family took time from watching their daughter die to meet with a Web site organizer to talk about e-mail lists? There has to be more to it than bad (or good) planning. Maybe it's just another ideological difference--we don't take quite as kindly to the Big Brother concept of the party or the candidate or the organizer knowing what's best for us. Plus, I bet it's a pretty good assumption that whatever anti-choice, conservative organization these e-mail addresses will get sold to have already been contacted by most of the sort of people who signed up to donate to the Schiavo family in the first place. These are the people who look up to Randall Terry. I think they're probably on more than one mailing list already.

I'm going to stop dumping on Kerry and others for not sharing their e-mail lists. Because when I signed up for Howard Dean's e-mail list in 2003, I signed up for Howard Dean's e-mail list. If I wanted to sign up for Kerry's* list a year later, I'm capable enough to have found my way to his sign-up page. If I want to be on the DNC's e-mail list, I'll go over there and join that, too. I don't need or want someone else choosing who gets to fill my in-box.


*Note: Blogger's spell check wants to replace "Kerry's" with Kerouac. Brilliant! Let's all do that!
It also wanted to change "DNC" to Dune, which is similarly hilarious if you've ever read the book or seen the movie. Ahh, "humankind's most ancient and unattainable dream": A Democratic president.

Reinventing a high-tech wheel

Just an item of note in case any of my 1 1/2 readers (I've downgraded the number, seeing as how I didn't update the site for most of a week) miss this in tomorrow's Post:

The Internet has become so huge -- and so misused -- that some worry that its power to improve society has been undermined. Now a movement is gathering steam to upgrade the network, to create an Internet 2.0.

Not so much class-related, but worth a read if you're at all curious about how everything you know will be obsolete (again) in a few years.

Oh yeah, this blog thing...

Someone in class last week made a comment about Democratic candidates contintually being forced to reinvent the wheel when it comes to designing Web sites. It made sense to me at the time, and in the context of the class discussion, but I later started to imagine what would happen if more candidates created cookie-cutter Web sites just for the sake of saving a few grand on Web design. Flashing back to the old Geocities make-your-own sites, or even the design templates of blogger, I decided to be grateful for a process that forces creativity in the place of a quick way out. That's how we get innovation, and that's how we get that one sparkling beauty that all the cool politicians try to emulate.

Reading the post over a Kos about the demise of Meetup.com (alas, poor Scott and Peter...), I was again grateful for the part of human nature that requires us to continually strive to build a better wheel. The grassroots rebellion within the grassroots is something to be amused by, and something for others to be inspired by.

Such a rebellion in another context would simply splinter an already pretty divided group--imagine a game of red rover played by competing Democratic organizers: "Red rover, red rover, send The Seattle Impeach Bush Meetup Group right over." Groups would side with one or another, with no clear winner and a lot of duplication. But this time there's no competition--Meetup clearly is on its way down, and the organizers on the Net are just trying to bring it, or a better version of it, back to life.

Of course, whether they do, and whether the concept is still the way to organize by the time 2008 rolls around remains to be seen.

Can we move on with the titles, please?

I received another message from MoveOn.org this week, one of about six or seven that I've received since last Monday from 3 different senders. Two were specific to Pennsylvania voters and were from Adam Ruben. A few more, from Noah T. Winer, were about their NPR petition. This last one, from MoveOn itself, simply told me to "Help set MoveOn's course."

This was not the first message I've received with that subject heading--the first appeared about two weeks after the November election, and I deleted it without even reading it in my post-election anti-political funk. I similarly deleted the ones that arrived in my box every six weeks or so, not really having the time or inclination to figure out exactly what MoveOn wanted me to do.

Inspired by this week's discussions on e-mailed newsletters, I finally took the leap and opened the message before I deleted it. The missive, addressed generically to "MoveOn member" contained the following message:

To get direction from our members, we have set up an online forum. There, you can share your ideas and goals for MoveOn and our nation. Comments are read and rated by other members and the best ideas float to the top. These help set MoveOn's course.

Take a few moments today to contribute to the Great Goals forum.

It's an ad for their brand spanking new blog and message board. Oh goody, because the Internet sure is lacking in liberal-oriented blogs these days.

But most of my problem with the message was the attitude that I should jump at the chance to help set MoveOn's course. I'd expect recipients of such similarly titled messages from, say, one of the major parties, would feel privileged to contribute to the party. But MoveOn? That premise is what the organization was founded on. I'm already primed to participate, and I'd thank MoveOn not to waste precious space in my in-box on telling me to get involved.

I'm the go-to girl for Chinese blogging

Because I've been following the developments somewhat closely, I thought I'd share yet another update about China's censorship of bloggers and messages on MSN Spaces. Wired magazine yesterday posted a dispatch containing an interview with one of China's first bloggers, who calls Microsoft "evil," and has these kind words to say:

"Internet users know what's evil and what's not evil, and MSN Spaces is an evil thing to Chinese bloggers."

Mao offers a unique perspective on the issue (one that hasn't yet been heard in stories I've seen). You may recall that Microsoft's defense has been that it's just following local practices in banning such words as "democracy" from its Web portal. Mao and Wired point out that no, it's not actually local practice to ban these words from blogs and e-mails:

Existing Chinese blog-hosting companies ... [police] their members' blogs for postings that might get the company and its users in trouble: The phrase "China needs democracy," for example, would set off a red flag. But "democracy" itself is not a dirty word, says Mao. Likewise, text about human rights abuses outside of China is not banned.

I first started following this story here because I was worried about Microsoft finally coming up with a filtering software that works and bringing it back over here, thus creating the dream product for many "protect the kiddies" legislators.

But now I'm wondering what effect this expanding story will have on our own politicians. Will someone seize on it as another example of China's blatant censorship? Will they ignore it in favor of promoting trade relations with the huge Chinese population?

As the story veers away from our class discussion, I'm probably going to stop following it here (and I'm going to post an on-topic message in a bit), but the whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I hope it does for you, too.

Yet another aggregator

Frustrated by trying to keep up with the blogs? Salon.com's trying to make your life simpler with yet another blog aggretating site.

The purpose is to give you a quick overview of what’s buzzing online, to provide a forum for direct dialogue, and to allow those of you from opposing parts of the political spectrum to debate one another and share your views on the issues covered in the Daou Report.

Just thought I'd pass that along.

Apparently I've found a theme

I've posted a lot lately about government attempting to control the Internet, and this Slashdot blurb falls into that category. It links to an AP story, which is a rewrite of a press release (pdf link) from the Cyber Security Internet Alliance, a group the AP describes as having pushed for better Internet security legislation, and cautioned lawmakers against worthless, misguided legislation that doesn't fix the problem.

The survey found most Americans want the government to secure the Internet, but don't trust the government to do so. It also found that most Americans trust Microsoft with security (note to America: STOP!).

The results prompted one lobbyist to say this: "I don't think the public knows what it wants Congress to do, but it wants Congress to do something."

When you have lobbyists giving comments like that to reporters, can ill-advised legislation be far behind? I don't know what it is about the Internet that has Americans and their lawmakers so scared and, well, freaked out, but rather than being excited about the possibility of new media changing politics for the better, I'm worried about the possibility of politics changing new media for the worse.

I know we won't get to most of this stuff until the middle of July, but I can still worry until then.

Filling up my in-box

As we've all been reading about newsletters this week, one completely obvious question popped into my mind this afternoon (because what else is there to do when you've already waited 45 freaking minutes for your stupid Metrobus to come along?): What's so fancy about newsletters?

In their book, Emi and Phil describe them as "short and well-written, without a lot of platitudes of puffery," and I wonder if the examples we read this week are a bit bloated by that definition. At the very least, none of Bush's or Kerry's many e-mailed newsletters qualified as short (and certainly weren't lacking in the "platitudes and puffery" category).

But what I'm really wondering about is if newsletters are even the right medium to be discussing as we look toward the future. We can customize everything about the information that arrives to our brains from our computers, but someone, somewhere along the way decided that newsletters from presidential candidates wouldn't be customized (much). I'm torn over whether newsletters e-mails like this are even a medium worth saving.

How do you reach out and touch people in an increasingly self-centered society?

It seems newsletters in digital form face the same problems all media face--they capture a flash, a moment in time and afterward run the risk of being made obselete. Kerry sends out an e-mail update in the morning, Bush gives a new speech 2 hours later, Kerry follows up with another e-mail rebuttal and a speech in the afternoon--pretty soon my in-box is full of Kerry's strained arguments and I'm beginning to tune out everything he says. On the other hand, if he only sends out one e-mail a week, I'll be at a loss if I wait more than a day to sort through its contents because much of it will have been made obsolete by the daily campaign events.

We'll be trading our dollars for googles soon

This week in class, we had a side discussion about the relative merits of PayPal and how, now that it's pretty much your only option for online commerce, it's actually improved from its early days.

Well, just as they did with news aggregators, maps and directions and, well, everything else, Google has decided to take on Internet commerce.

As with everything else Google does, no exact details are known yet.

Dem$%#@!&, Part II

A few days ago, I wrote about an AP story detailing how China is blocking certain words from MSN users' blogs and messages.

I figured then that the story would fizzle out, and told a commenter that the U.S. probably wouldn't respond in any way; I thought that would be the end of the tale, another sad example of why China isn't such a hot place to live right now.

Apparently, though, there are still a few more lives left in this cat of a story, as the LA Times reported yesterday.

As you'd expect from an LAT take on the same story that was covered by AP, the Times writers get a bit more in-depth with the entire issue. Specifically, they explore other ways in which U.S. companies "support local laws," as Microsoft argues it's doing now:

Microsoft adds that filtering objectionable words is nothing new. In the United States, the company blocks use of several words in titles, including "whore" and "pornography."

Yahoo and Google, two other large Internet firms, have also imposed limits on search results in France and Germany, where Nazi propaganda and memorabilia are banned.

Not to beleabor the points that were very well made by Searls and Weinberger, but when are companies and governments going to realize banning key words and phrases is not going to keep those ideas from being expressed? China is banning "demonstration," but not "riot," "violent chaos," but not "violent uprising."

But what really worries me is if Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay and all the rest are so willing to work with the Chinese government on filtering software, what happens when China starts seriously demanding filtering software that works? Sure, the idea of banning particular thoughts and ideas has pretty much become a joke here in the States, but what happens when the companies--faced with the possibility of making billions of dollars if they can just appease a very sympathetic government--really start working on this stuff? And then what happens when they've finally done it, and want to try selling it over here?

Leaders of the pack

Wired magazine yesterday posted an interview with Rep. Chris Boucher, who apparently has sided with consumers in the intellectual-property judical lottery, saying that "the balance of copyright law has tipped too far toward the entertainment companies' interests, hampering consumers' rights to use digital media."

The content of Boucher's interview and position aren't so much important here (though kudos to him for having them). What I'm interested in is the idea of a politician--one of those mostly old, mostly white dudes who hang out in that big building down the street from my office--is actually ahead of the learning curve when it comes to technology (and hush, I'm not getting all age-ist here).

One of the things that's hampered the development and implementation of new technology on a national political level is that the people in charge tend to want to do things their own way, the way they're comfortable doing things. Maybe the only reason some of them have Web sites at all (even badly designed ones, as Boucher himself aptly demonstrates), is because they had young staff members hounding them every day until they got one. So as far behind the times as your average voter is, maybe your average politican is even farther behind.

Aside from that horrible first crack at regulation with the Communications Decency Act, our government has largely left the Internet alone, either realizing it can't be regulated or out of fear of even trying to keep up with it. Could you imagine the state of political technology right now if our representatives were even half as knowledgable about and interested in the Internet as the folks in our class.

What would Congress be like if it were run by the staff of Wired magazine? Or the CS department of your college?

Score again for the old media behemoth

Spending the morning playing around with Jakob Nielson's discussions about e-mail newsletters, I have to once again ask the obvious question: Why on earth should we trust his opinions on design or usability when his site looks the way it does? I'm all for the diamond-in-the-rough approach, but on the Internet, when my attention is being drawn in a million different directions, it's tough to keep my mind focused on the abomination of Web design that is Nielson's work.

Despite that, I'm glad Nielson tackled the question of professionally published newsletters versus those created by the campaigns, coming down heavily in favor of the Post's newsletter:

The Post gets high scores for newsletter content, but then so did the presidential candidates. You would expect a leading newspaper to have people who can write and edit, and they do, collecting a tad more points in this area than the campaign newsletters. ... The Post's Web design team and newsletter editors have done a superlative job and beat both George W. Bush and John Kerry by a mile.

I'm not sure why this surprised me. I think I was just taken aback for a moment that someone on the Web actually recognized the value of having talanted professional editors and designers create a product such as as newsletter. (note: I edit and design newspaper pages for a living, so of course I'm going to say this.)

It was great while it lasted

We are a commercial society. Obviously.

In the early days of the Internet, after the porn, came Amazon and eBay, and then the tech explosion of the late '90s. Once people figured out that you could make money on this thing (huge, obscene amounts of money in some cases), the masses flooded AOL and Compuserve with new accounts, and soon everyone in America was cleaning out their basements and holding a nationwide yard sale on eBay. Things calmed down somewhat, but the main question most people ask of a new tech venture is, "Sounds great, but how can I make money off of that?" Blogs rake in the ad sales, for example; cell phone companies rake in massive amounts of cash from hip young kids too lazy move anything but their thumbs. (Though the folks who designed the Live 8 text fund-raising plan didn't even consider trying it over here, because "hardly any" Amercans use text messaging.)

So what does this do to politics? It's not a profitable business, in the traditional sense of a commodity. On a medium where everyone can have power on a generally even playing field, the concept of power as it applies to politics may not seem so appealing. New media organizational tools--things like smart mobs--tend to work best with people who are already connected and engaged. But we've yet to see a tool that will not only convince the masses to get involved with politics, but to do it online. Digital music had the iPod, but what do voters get?

Ice skating in hell, anyone?

This has nothing to do with class, but I figured the two people who visit this blog (Hi, mom!) would find this as interesting as I do: Hillary Clinton and Rupert Murdoch may be teaming up.

But what a couple they’d make! For the 74-year-old native of Australia, an embrace of Mrs. Clinton would be only the latest in a long string of daring and (mostly) winning political plays. For New York’s junior Senator, it would be the perfection of an art that she and her husband have practiced for more than a decade: keeping your enemies close.

By the way, that crack about no one visiting here? I spent about 20 minutes this morning ranking the statistics of everyone in the class who had sitemeter attached to their blog. Kinda made me want to start posting completely radical ideas just to build up site traffic and boost my ego. (It should come as no suprise to anyone that Peter C and Kathie came out on top, by the way). And then I realized that's what bloggers do anyway, with Wonkette and her jokes about the size of John Kerry's penis, and possibly even Kos with his nasty e-mail. You may not like them, and you may in fact be disgusted by them, but at least you've heard their names, possibly visited their sites a few times, and most certainly boosted their traffic, and thus their ad rates.

Dem$%#@!&

I edited two stories today that I was going to post here. One was the Live 8 text fund-raising that we talked about in class tonight, but I'm pretty sure no one's posted the other one yet.

On May 26, MSN launched the My Spaces portal in China; since then, more than 5 million people have registered their blogs. China's a pretty exciting place politically and technologically right now; the latest tech toys our political circles discover are often old news across the sea.

But with the launch of My Spaces, the Chinese government--with the consent and cooperation of Microsoft--is censoring the messages being posted through the portal. Along with profanity and sexual language, a few other choice words are sure to get your message flagged and force the sender to rewrite her message: "Democracy," "freedom," and "human rights."

We keep talking about the doors technology can open for politics, but it's also worth nothing that under the wrong circumstances, technology can be used to close doors, too.


Though it's also important to see that the Chinese government fell into the same trap our president did when he tried to keep his name from falling into the wrong hands on the Web--changing the subject line of a sentence or a character here or there seems to let messages go through in China.

All the animals in Internet Park are female...

In a discussion with Christopher Lydon on Lydon's blog last year, political consultant Dick Morris made the following comment about blogging:

Let’s remember that the Internet is more male than female, more right-wing than left-wing, more upscale than downscale.

A comment truly designed for the bloggers to feast upon, I'm choosing to focus on the first segment: Is the Internet more male than female? More to the point, is blog a masculine word? The article I just linked to claims that of the top 20 American blogs on Sitemeter.com, only one is written by a woman--Ana Marie Cox of Wonkette.

Cox herself has made several observations on her role--that of the prominent female bloggers out there, most are right-wing, and that other females criticize her for "talking like a sailor" on Wonkette. Both speak to a larger issue: That because the blogosphere thrives on sites linking to one another based on shared commentary, blogging is the ultimate boys' club. Wonkette doesn't fall in with the right-wing women, and she always seems in danger of being dismissed by the "serious" political blogs.

Steven Levy, Newsweek's tech guru, was one of many who addressed the issue after a Harvard conference on blogging this spring featured very few women (and even fewer non-whites, but that's a fight for another day).

Will this change as blogs go mainstream, or will the blogs be the last mainstream refuge for the old boys' club? If blogs are so democratic, why are the top blogs so overwhelmingly male?

Paper--who needs it?

The posters over at Slashdot clued me in to a new government initiative to digitize all government publications and documents. The basics:

GPO is working with the library community on a national digitization plan, with
the goal of digitizing a complete legacy collection of tangible U.S. Government
publications. The objective is to ensure that the digital collection is
available, in the public domain, for no-fee permanent public access through the
FDLP.

I realize we've heard rumblings like this for more than a decade--books! documents! All our modern history at the tip of your fingertips!--but now that we're out of the tech bubble and things are starting to actually happen on a normal scale, I'm wondering if we'll really start to see real-world implementation of those dreams. As the nation takes baby steps toward making online searching part of every day life for everyone, not just kiddies and techies like us, I wonder what sort of corresponding interests and shifts in the online political community will follow.

Role playing

One of the indictments often made against the mainstream media is that they're to blame for the generally undereducated and uninvolved population.


My response to those arguments is that the role is in the eye of the beholder--sure, if that's what you think the media should be or ever has been, you're going to think they're failing miserably now. But what if the mainstream media was never meant to be the sole source of political education for the public? The various forms of the mainstream media have been around for a very long time, and yet throughout the history of our country we've never been a particularly politically active or educated society. Nearly century ago, Walter Lippman decried the ignorance of the population and generally sad state of political involvement (this less than 10 years after women finally were granted suffrage).

Maybe now we're actually entering an age in which the mainstream media can fulfill its actual purpose--stoking interest, reporting on the news of the day and informing audiences about their communities, among so many others. The next step of that process may be for the audience member or voter to actually go out and seek the information for themselves.

While most people never really take advantage of it, the mainstream media give Americans all the tools with which to educate themselves. Finally, with blogs, government Web sites and all the other tools the Internet puts at our fingertips, even the laziest members of our society can easily be educated (with graphics! And flash! And songs!) about our democracy. Problem is, I bet they won't bother.

We're so quick to blame the media for not being active enough in our education; I'd rather blame the audience for being too passive.

Brother, can you spare a dime?

In light of this week's fund-raising topic, I thought I'd share something I've come across while working on my strategic plan. Now, I'm willing to accept that the Virginia Green Party doesn't have much in the way of resources, but let's just look at some of the many things about their donation page that would make me run away from them, clutching my wallet tightly to my nondonating hands.

First, let's see if they've updated this section of their Web site in a while, because I'd like to think the party is on top of things when it comes to collecting my money:





Would you donate money to a party that hasn't updated their fund-raising site in more than 2 years? Didn't think so.

Well, maybe they just forgot to change the date. Maybe their technology is actually pretty recent and they're all set up with the newest ways to accept your money, such as electronic checks or credit card payments or whatever else has come along:



The Green Party does not accept money from corporations, unions, or PACs; apparently, they're not too keen on accepting it from people, either.

A class idea?

In my first post, I predicted the creation of blog cliques, and while I haven't actually borne this thought out through research, I bet they've come to pass. I know I have the four or five blogs that I randomly picked a few weeks ago that I follow--chosen either because I liked the design or because their first post or two intrigued me in some way. I certainly don't read everyone's blogs every day, and I wonder if I've even read every blog at least once. Our blog cliques have been formed based on our real-life friends, or by reading the posts of those who take the time to comment on our blogs.

In "real" blog circles, people tend to make a name for themselves by having their posts highlighted on other sites; the sites that collect the most interesting group of posts often become the first stopping place for the daily trek through the blogosphere. Maybe something like that would work for us.

What am I saying here? I'm saying it might be interesting if every day (more?), Emi or Phil were to link to the post they find most intriguing among our classmates'. It may serve to unite our discussions behind a single topic (or at least lessen the cacophany of dozens of voices competing at the same volume), and it would certainly clue us in to the threads we may otherwise be missing.

Keep in touch

My mom just forwarded me this e-mail:

Your elected representatives would like to periodically email you information about issues vital to Pennsylvania.
Receiving this information by email is a fast, efficient and an inexpensive way to find out what is going on during these significant times, and will provide you with timely information about news important to you and your family. Email is part of an ongoing effort to keep Voters informed about the latest news and how upcoming issues will affect you.
If you would prefer not to receive these email messages, please follow the instructions at the bottom of this message.

Aside from forgetting to give the message one last proofreading effort and generally bad style in the first place, this seems like a good idea if it pans out. I wonder how my mom got on the list--the e-mail came into the junk account she hasn't used for a long time, but the family has had that address for more than a decade.

A few interesting issues with this e-mail: First, I think it's a bit pushy that you have to opt out, rather than opt in, especially considering that I'm not sure where they came up with their e-mail list. If they bought it from a candidate whose site my mom signed up for, then they're probably reaching people who are interested in Pa. politics, but what if they just targeted all the Pa. residents on some other e-mail list?

I also wonder how targeted these e-mails will be--because my parents live in central Pennsylvania, will they receive e-mails specifically regarding their representatives and issues affecting the area? Or will it just be a statewide blanket e-mail that won't tell my parents anything they won't be able to figure out by reading the local paper or visiting the state's Web site.

Intellectual elitism rears its ugly head

I'll get back to explaining my anti-persuasion theories in due time, and I'll mark each entry in the sequence so you can find them by looking at the titles. But something else has come up that especially...hmm...bugged me.

Daily Rag, based on a post on Idealist's blog, makes several points about the language used by "old" media and how it differs from language used by bloggers. Idealist's original point was that newspapers tend to use inclusive language, aiming to reach large portions of the possible reading audience, while blogs, unconstrained by such commercial issues, tend to use more "exclusive" language.

Daily Rag took the issue and ran with it, to a point that I feel veered dangerously close to ugly intellectual elitism. And, you know, maybe the fault lies with the impersonal communication of this medium and maybe I just missed the finer nuances of his argument (a phenomenon explored over at Kathie's Politech), and if I'm offended for no reason, I apologize. But I was offended, and so were a few people I directed to the blog.

But first I have to point out that both Idealist and Daily Rag are a bit off when they say newspapers are written for a sixth-grade reading level. The stat comes from USA Today, which was originally written for a seventh-grade reading level; it's not necessarily indicative of the entire industry. I've designed hundreds of newspaper pages, written thousands of headlines and edited millions of words, and I've never once chosen not to use a word because I thought my readers wouldn't understand the language.

My main problem with Daily Rag's post is that is confuses levels of discourse and argument with the language used to make them; "Sophisticated arguments and obscure cultural allusions" have nothing to do with vocabulary. He argues that newspaper readers who are confronted with unknown words or allusions are merely frustrated, while readers of blogs are able to make use of the infinite resources of the Internet to learn about new issues and arguments.

Any mildly intellectual person who confronts a foreign concept in the pages of his or her newspaper is fully capable of looking up anything they are confused about; It's not like the decades before the Internet were filled with newspaper readers stumbling around going, "Gosh, if only I had something with which I could better understand these concepts and words. Alas, I will sit here in my ignorance, forever doomed to not knowing what the newspaper is trying to teach me."

When facing the concepts of sophisticated arguments and simple language, why do we have to choose either/or? Because we want to feel better than everyone else? Because we get a rush when we know what the hell Mark Halperin is talking about on the Note? Because we need to justify spending a few grand on a graduate education?

Daily Rag's other point, that the level of education of Internet users exceeds that of newspaper readers, also strikes me as a bit elitist. Most research has shown that newspaper readers (as opposed to users of every other medium) are consistently better informed about world events. Level of education is so not a good indicator of intelligence or comprehension ability.

(Despite all this, I, too, am a huge fan of the "West Wing," and especially of the "Let Bartlet be Bartlet" philosophy.)

Blogging from the barn

Remember what I said earlier today about blogs reaching the more technologically conservative segments of society? Apparently I underestimated just how far they're reaching:

Reuters has a quick little feature on how Pennsylvania's tourism office is blogging its way through Amish country.

Who knew Ohio was so important?

When Ohio suddenly became the new Florida for all of five minutes last November, I figured it wouldn't be long before the Buckeye state started popping up in the hipster columns. You may not yet have seen this column in which WaPo Web writer Robert MacMillan looks at an AP story about how blogs are affecting Ohio politics.

I went to college in Ohio, right around the time Jim Traficant was sent to prison. People in my college town tended to side with Traficant, which tells you something about what flies and what doesn't in Ohio politics.

Anyway, the AP story MacMillan references is worth a read, because he talks about how Chris Baker is using special elections in Ohio's 2nd district as a sort of testing ground for blogging/new media tactics, looking for strategies that will and won't succeed when the real races come around. It's also worth reading because Baker likes to refer to Republicans as Sith lords.

But what's also interesting is that the AP is starting to get a better grip on blogs. As part of my job, I'm pretty much glued to the news wires, so I read a lot of AP tech stories. Usually when AP gets ahold of a story about culture, especially a tech story, it means the time has already come and gone for the story's topic--AP's often a bit behind the curve, to say the least. That they're covering blogs with actual insight most likely doesn't mean we've hit a jump-the-shark moment, though; on the contrary, I think it's probably indicitive of blogs gaining more ground in mainstream, technologically conservative areas of the audience. What that means for blogs is up in the air.

Apparently keeping with theme of whacked-out political communities, MacMillan also gets into a bit of analysis of Philly politicos' use of blogs. It's always fun to read about Philly politics.

Day 2: A short history of media effects theory

Second post of the day, because I'm feeling oh so verbose...

I'm trying to do this as succinctly as possible, so if I skip over something that doesn't make sense, please let me know. Today is going to get a little dense as I explain (briefly, trust me), where I stand within the whole media-effects sphere and why I don't think the Internet will persuade voters. To do that, I need to get a little bit into media-effects theory.

In media theory, there a two schools of thought: Those who believe in strong media effects, and those who don't. The limited-effects school faces some existential issues, for if they don't believe in media effects, why have they devoted their professional lives to studying the media?

They rationalize this in a simple way: by redefining the scope of media effects. They reject the existence of what most people call strong media effects; for them, however, the smallest possible effect takes on a renewed meaning. They still believe the media can affect the audience, but they have more realistic expectations about what media can do to and for audiences (and voters).

Simply put, it's like everyone who's been looking for media effects has been wearing glasses, and by removing the glasses we can see the bigger picture--things that looked small don't look so small anymore. I know that's muddled, and maybe I'll come up with a better analogy later today.

For our context, this simply means the following: one school believes the media can persuade voters to cast their ballots for a particular candidate, while the other school does not. That doesn't mean the Internet doesn't have any effects on voters (because obviously it does), but it does mean that the Internet doesn't affect voters the way you think it does.

Coming tomorrow (Edit: coming soon. I will get back to this): Opinion leaders and mitigating effects

Totally off-topic

Has anyone else noticed that the blogger default spell check doesn't recognize "blog" as a word?

Why the Internet won't persuade voters

As promised, I'm going to start talking about why I don't think the Internet can or will persuade voters. Because holding this belief puts me in the distinct minority in this class, I'm taking a roundabout approach to this argument; over the next few days I'll be explaining where I'm coming from, why I believe the things that I do and where this fits in the context of other media theories. At times, I fear that I'll veer midly off-topic for the course, but I'm doing this because I strongly believe what I'm going to say here plays a pivotal role in understanding what effect the Internet can or will have on the political sphere.

Today I'm focusing on where I stand, and over the next few days I'll get into the why.

Over at Decision 08, who is one of the bloggers to have noticed our class project, Hegemon asked the author if he (she?) believed the Internet has the capability to be persuasive. Decision08, like Emi and many of the members of our class have in other places, wrote the following response:

Hegemon, I absolutely think the Internet has the capacity to be persuasive. The possibility of convincing someone of the rightness of your position in a single blog post is slim to none; however, I have referred from time to time here to the 'meme' effect, wherein the cumulative nature of the blogosphere kicks in, and an idea spreads like a virus, in the manner of Richard Dawkins...Hegemon, the perfect example is the CNN Eason Jordan affair, in which the blogosphere basically forced Jordan to resign (and I don't think that's an exaggeration, in this case)

This is not a persuasive effect. Remember in class tonight when Jonah talked a bit about how the blogosphere is a little too full of itself right now? Getting someone fired is neither a persuasive effect not a phenomenon unique to new media and blogs. Larry Sabato addresses the history of media feeding frenzies going back several decades, exploring instances in which the shark-like media (get it?) have swarmed (sometimes seemingly at random) on a politician or public figure and bombarded him or her with such negative coverage that they are eventually forced to resign from public life. And while I disagree with a lot of Sabato's finer points, he's great at illustrating the "power" of the press to force powerful people from their positions.

So what is persuasion?

Simply put, persuasion is the act of making someone change his or her mind. In our case, this most often means voters--convincing a person to vote for one candidate or another, or to vote at all. How much of a role can the media (and specifically the Internet) play in this process?

Most people in this class--heck, most people in the nation--believe the media to varying degrees undoubtedly has a persuasive effect on voters.

I don't.


Coming tomorrow: A quick history of media-effects theory and where I came to this wacko conclusion.

Timing is everything

I probably should have waited until I read the CNN article for this week to post about political activism in the digital age, because the piece reminded me of one of the arguments against the increasing reliance on technology.

I don't agree with many of the arguments made in the book "Digital Divide," but I can't help but wonder who's getting left behind when activists are increasingly relying on technology to organize. I've had a cell phone since the late '90s, and I've been online since the early '90s (anyone else remember BBSs? IRC?), and I've always considered myself a fairly connected (and politically active, protest-inclined person). However, I don't have a digital camera, I don't have a BlackBerry, I don't have text messaging on my cell phone and my laptop is not enabled with WiFi technology. Don't get me wrong, I spend lots of disposable income on tech toys such as TiVo and Vonage, and my lack of connectedness is a matter of choosing one toy over another rather than not being able to afford any of them.

But I worry about the people who can't afford whatever cent-per-message is the going rate for texting these days. Because I'm not connected, am I--along with millions more who have the inclination but not the financing--not allowed to participate in the revolution?

Off track for a moment

Having generally entertained the class topic for the day, I direct your attention to this story from the BBC, in which newspaper folk meet to discuss the news that newspaper circulation and advertising revenue are up.

There were also, of course, speakers who warned "against complacency, predicting that free papers, online news sites, and the spread of blogs and other non-mainstream news sources would put growing pressure on the readership of traditional newspapers."

It may be a dead horse, but I'm going to beat it every single chance I get for the few of you folks reading here. GO BUY A NEWSPAPER!

Dumb and dumber

...And by "dumb" I mean quiet.


It's Sunday afternoon and I want to learn about recent events in the world of politics. My options:

--Online, the only thing Drudge is doing today is plugging his radio show for tonight; The only political posts on Kos are links to major pieces by the NYT and WaPo; Slate.com hasn't updated anything but the Doonsbury cartoon and the daily front pages wrap-up.

--On the wires, The Associated Press (and thus most Web sites today and daily newspapers tomorrow morning) is only moving wrap-ups of assorting morning show appearances.

--On television, the only thing they're talking about is that missing woman in Aruba and Time magazine's sudden realization that young adults are too broke to live on their own; I missed the morning shows while I was at work this morning; Currently I am trying to stomach a pre-recorded interview which shows Alexander Haig on C-SPAN bitching about W. Mark Felt.

What does this leave me with, aside from the faint taste of bile? It leaves me with the daily newspapers. It leaves me with the Times' story about how Bush's tax cuts have created a class of super-rich; assorted WaPo stories, including one about Bush's ignorantly rosy vision of events in Baghdad; and a LAT piece about Bush's second-term foreign policy.

So much is made about the Internet being an immediate medium, but even the bloggers and journalism junkies on the Web take the weekends off. (Those that don't often limit their Sunday/weekend posting to wrap-ups of the papers, as DCist began doing this morning.)

Like beating a dead horse

No so much related to politics per se, but NPR has an interesting piece about newspapers turning to podcasting as a way to go after those young readers who have turned away from the printed word. The crux of the story:

Newspapers have traditionally been slow to adopt new technologies, like the Internet and blogging. Tired of playing catch-up, a small number are now embracing the latest digital media.

Call me behind the times, but podcasting has never been something that I've completely understood. I've had and loved my iPod for years, and I've even upgraded (downgraded?) to a shuffle to take along when I go jogging, but to me podcasting smacks of one of those passing fads--like Crystal Pepsi, New Coke, and Jenny McCarthy--that will be forgotten in a few years except by those who track such things. Are newspapers that adopt podcasting hitching their hopes to the wrong star?

I'm not entirely sure I agree with NPR that newspapers missed the boat on blogging, considering the fact that most people in America--voters, readers, subscribers or, generally, anyone over the age 40 of belonging to any sort of civic category--still don't know what the hell a blog is anyway.

Building on yesterday

So the Internet was populated by highly politically engaged people in the beginning. Then the rest of the country began moving online, and those highly politically engaged people got lost in the shuffle, and with them went the dreams of Platonic utopians everywhere who had pinned their hopes on using the Internet to build a better level of political discourse in this country. But because those people and millions more like them didn't just disappear, you have to wonder, what happened to them?

Lance Bennett (in an article not assigned for this class, so don't freak out that I'm reading off of a different syllabus or anything) offers one explanation for the new target of this highly engaged class: "Non-state, transnational targets such as corporations and trade regimes." In a 2003 essay, he found that activists were increasingly relying on Internet-based communications technology--indeed setting the trends that would be later used by activists operating in the mainstream U.S. political arena--to create "growing coordination of communication and action across international activist networks.”

Like rats fleeing a sinking ship, can the activists tell us something about mainstream political involvement and the Internet? Does the future of Internet politics belong to mainstream candidates who co-opt the activism networks' tactics and techniques, or will Internet politics someday be synonymous with the fringes of politics?

The digital citizen and his digital vote

In the mid-'90s, Wired magazine commissioned a survey of the people spending the most time on the Internet. As the nation was just beginning to wake up to this new toy, the magazine's editors wanted to know who, exactly, was leading the charge to the wired world. The report found:

[T]hey're knowledgeable, tolerant, civic-minded, and radically committed to
change. Profoundly optimistic about the future, they're convinced that
technology is a force for good and that our free-market economy functions as a powerful engine of progress. But among the survey's many powerful findings, one in particular caught me by surprise: where I had described them as deeply estranged from mainstream politics, the poll revealed that they are actually highly participatory and view our existing political system positively, even patriotically.

The survey was among the first to reveal what many of us take for granted now (or what some of use are just beginning to realize, a little behind the curve)--that those who can afford the luxury of spending free time and money on surfing the Web (and in particular visiting blogs daily) are highly involved already. Indeed, they are not really the sort who need to be persuaded to vote, and they are especially not the sort who can be persuaded to vote for a particular candidate.

This is all leading up to a post about why I don't think the Internet can be used to persuade undecided voters, which you'll find in a few days, for those of you who care to come back.

Internet-colored glasses

Again with the Bimber and Davis...

Debating a point made by Nicholas Negropone via Cass Sunstein, Bimber and Davis argue that the "daily me" society, in which individuals receive "their own customized, tailored, personalized version of news and communication" is factually wrong. They argue that human behavior tends toward society that depends on a combination of traditional and new media:

The interdependence of traditional and new media suggests that few political
Internet site users limit their received information to online sources.

Sigh. If only...

I am astounded at the number of people in our class who are comforable with only using online news sources. And I am slightly appalled at the number who are proud of their dependence and reliance on such sources exclusively.

Sadly, the world Bimber and Davis argued could not exist is the one in which we now live. "I only read the news sources I agree with, and those sources are only online" is too often proudly stated by those who claim to be engaged citizens.

And it's not just a matter of reading opposing viewpoints on the blogs or relying on Matt Drudge to give you the important news of the day. For years, studies have shown that people who read newspapers--actual, physical inky paper pulp foreign to most people under 30--not only get the most information but recall the most information. It's long been said that if you took the 22 minutes of content from your network news broadcast and typed the text into newspaper column inches, you wouldn't even fill half of the front page of The New York Times.

I bet if you took the blog posts and online banter so-called engaged people read daily, you'd barely fill half of a column of the front page.