Politiae

Yay!

2005-07-24T21:10:00.000-04:00

Really, free books for you

2005-07-23T20:53:00.000-04:00

Speaking of ethics and intellectual property rights...

Turns out that thanks to the Internet, the new Harry Potter book has already been pirated. See, J.K. Rowling has for years forbid the creation of an eBook for her massively popular series, which is, I suppose, her right as the creator of the series and all that.

But it only took a few hours after the midnight release of Harry Potter 6 for copies to have been scanned with OCR readers and shared on IRC channels (man, that takes me back).

What impresses me most about this project isn't that it was done at all--if there's a way to get something for free, the Internet will eventually provide it--but the worldwide coordination of the folks who managed this project. It took 11 hours for all 672 pages of this book to be scanned, and now, nearly a week later, it's widely available in any format you'd like.

When I got on the bus the Monday after the book was released, at least half a dozen people were reading it, including myself. Thankfully, I finished it that afternoon so I didn't have to cart it around for another day. But man, now I wished I'd just grabbed a word file and put it in my PDA; even if it was a lot shorter than the last one, I still didn't relish carting that book around and trying to read it in the tiny space afforded me by the large man who sat next to me on the bus.

2005-07-22T08:46:00.000-04:00

Administrative note

2005-07-21T21:55:00.000-04:00

With reliable Internet access finally restored, I'm slowly typing in entries I've written the last few weeks. I started with the shorter ones, but here's a preview of what's to come if you're interested in coming back tomorrow evening and reading up. (Note: the awesomely substantial posts are the ones I've put off posting until later tonight/tomorrow, so it's really in your best interest to come back and look for the new ones.)

Among the highlights:

July 8: Day one of digital divide, in which our heroine explains why she doesn't think the argument is all it's cracked up to be. Really.
July 11: Day two of digital divide, in which our heroine softens the blow and explains why she's not crazy.

July 14: You call yourself an influential? Our heroine explains that the concept of an "influential" is nothing new, and points you toward some studies done back in the 1920s, when they were called "opinion-makers."
July 15: Our trusty blogger explains why she thought this week's class speaker (and the people whose ideas she was discussing) was slightly off when explaining how an influential works and how ideas are spread from the engaged folk to the rest of the population. You'll especially want to see this one.

A final note on Chinese bloggers

2005-07-21T21:41:00.000-04:00

A few weeks back I got into a sort of blogging-in-China phase. And today, conveniently enough, as I'm in the process of typing in entries, I came across this piece from The Washington Post, which argues that it's not just Microsoft (the object of my earlier derision) but also Yahoo and Cisco and others who have sold their technological souls to do business with the Chinese government.

Anne Applebaum, the author of the Post piece, (who, ironically enough, uses a Yahoo address as her contact line) brings up the issue of whether the sorts of deals these companies are making are even legal:

If this isn't illegal, maybe it should be. After the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the United States passed a law prohibiting U.S. firms from selling "crime control and detection" equipment to the Chinese. But in 1989, the definition of police equipment ran to truncheons, handcuffs and riot gear. Has it been updated? We may soon find out: A few days ago, Rep. Dan Burton of the House Foreign Relations Committee wrote a letter to the Commerce Department asking exactly that. In any case, it's time to have this debate again. There could be other solutions -- such as flooding the Chinese Internet with filter-breaking technology.

As with many stories, I'm continually amazed this has hit bigger (for the record, I first learned about it from an AP story back in May). The blogosphere especially has been silent on the issue, aside from a few dozen people linking to the Wired story back in June, which itself was a few weeks behind the curve.

I've said it in a lot of posts before this, and I'll say it again: This is really scary stuff, and the chapters we read for class this week didn't even begin to scratch the surface. (The chapters, by the way, were published six weeks before the introduction of MSN's My Spaces to the Chinese blogosphere.)

Free books for you

2005-07-21T20:06:00.000-04:00

Lately, I've been wondering what philosophical difference divides a good-old library, where one can go to enjoy free books, from downloading music off P2Ps. Why is it that the book industry doesn't rise up to complain about all those people stealing the intellectual property of authors like the thousands of recording artists and lawyers who swear they'll go broke if we don't pay $16.99 for yet another version of Alanis Morissette's "Jagged Little Pill." (I admit to not doing too much digging beyond Wikipedia into the history of libraries, but that entry leads me to believe the library boat had already sailed by the time book publishers came along.) It's safe to say that I generally tend to err toward the side of free use for all.

It is with this mentality that I approached Lessig's "The Future of Ideas," and I'd intended to write a little rant on its applications in regard to musical file sharing, essentially claiming, for perhaps the 5,000th time since I first encountered Napster that night in my freshman year dorm room, that music should be free, or at least freer than it is.

Ahh, but then I went home last week to visit my cats and my family. My mom works in a photo lab in one of those big box stores, and constantly regales me with stories about the completely random enforcement of copyright rules in her store. Big box store has a corporate-wide policy that each photo lab tends to enforce on its own, though my mom has done a bit of research and generally concluded that the laws on which big box store claims to be basing its policy don't exist. Basically, if you go into big box store to have your photos developed (or to have copies made of other photos) and they look "too good," the store employees are empowered to deny you your photos on the basis that you've probably stolen them from a professional and don't have permission to be making copies of them. This makes sense if you're trying to make copies of a professional portrait or something, but too often my mom's co-workers have randomly (and trust me, it is completely random) denied newlyweds access to the only copies of their wedding pictures because they looked "too good," even though the groom's second cousin took them with a disposable Kodak. (My mom, for the record, eventually helped get the photos back into the couple's hands.)

Through her protests of the big box policy, my mom's shared with me strange tidbits of American copyright law, much in the fashion of Lawrence Lessig.

Both examples, though, can apply to a simple statement Lessig makes: "Sometimes, a society gets stuck." We're stuck right now as we try to figure out what's fair to music-lovers and artists alike, just as my mom's big box employers are stuck because they tried to make a blanket policy that can easily be understood by big box employees and the lowest common denominator among their shoppers.

A real digital divide

2005-07-20T20:45:00.000-04:00

As a bunch of you know, I've had spotty Internet access lately. While it's given my lots of time to do off-line things like read actual books (I highly recommend "The Historian," by the way), it has forced me to live my off-work hours away from blogland. Sure, I could read blogs from work, and even write out my posts (literally write out--with a pen and paper!) and plan all the things I would say when I had reliable access again, but no way in hell was I going to actually log into blogger and post from the office. People in my field have been fired for that, repeatedly. And so I was forced to sit on the sidelines for days, weeks even, unable to participate. Oh how I pined... (note: heavy, heavy sarcasm).

So I've had lots of time to think about what it means to be online and connected. Now that I've been able to post all these entries that have been sitting in a notebook, you should know my feelings on the digital divide and how it often serves as a punching bag of sorts for all that ails our society. I admit I wasn't completely in the dark--I had lots of time at work to browse the Internet, after all, and it's not like I wasn't checking my e-mail 800 times a day like always. But still, without the nightly Internet fix, dripping into my body hour after hour like so much heroin, I did things like clean my apartment, laundry, go for walks and read books. Maybe if we just unplugged everyone for a few weeks a year, the world would be a much more calm place.

Bonus perk: Not paying much attention to Karl Rove for many days. God it felt good.

How Carol Darr was just a tiny bit off (just a bit!)

2005-07-15T19:59:00.000-04:00

Someone in class, and more than a few others on their blogs, questioned the effectiveness of the "influentials" if, as they are described by Carol Darr and some other ipdi-related folks, they all live here in Washington, D.C., or are concentrated in other metro areas and state capitals. Yeah, we're a transient society in this area, but we can't be moving around that much that our opinions can be expected to account for the dissemination of what I yesterday called the second part of the two-step flow of information.

It was a valid point, questioning how influentials are supposed to influence people when they're all hanging out in the same places themselves. Darr had a reasonable answer--that while we all belong to the DC community, we also have other communities of varying sizes among which we are the go-to folks for political information. The answer got about 60 percent of the puzzle right.

Back in the day, when they were first trying to figure out the role of these opinion leaders and followers, media researchers had one qualifying trait for the opinion leaders: They watched more media than the rest. They didn't necessarily live in major metro areas, and they weren't even necessarily that much more interested in politics than the rest of the population. They just happened to be the members of their sewing group, baseball team, bridge night who had the most insights to share about politics. The other members of the group would automatically turn to these folks with questions about politics, and eventually what these people thought filtered down to the rest of the population.

And that's the part I think Darr got a little bit wrong: It's not that opinion leaders are made and then set forth to filter through the rest of the population. It's that every single group, every single community, no matter how small, has home-grown opinion leaders. They may be leaders on which makeup to buy, on which cars to buy, on how to dress or on how to vote, but every group to which you belong has that one person to whom the rest of the group turns when it comes to making a decision.

One of the studies I read earlier this year, Elihu Katz's 1956 "Two-step flow of communication: an up-to-date report on an hypothesis," made an especially interesting point: that even in the same group of people, leaders and followers may switch roles when it comes to different subjects. Katz's piece, in which he addresses the four major Columbia studies to have been published so far, is actually really interesting and chock-full of details on the relationship between opinion leaders and their followers. It's arguably a more interesting a read than "The Influentials," but don't let Ed Keller hear me saying that...

Everything new is old again

2005-07-14T19:32:00.000-04:00

Back when we first started this project, I hoped to do a series of posts about why I didn't think the Internet was capable of persuading voters. At the time, I was three weeks removed from one of my program's core courses, Media Theory and Effects, which that semester was taught by a man who was most decidedly among the limited-effects academics, those who don't like to blame the media for everything that goes wrong in human society. I tried, and apparently failed miserably, to condense five months of class into blog entries explaining the background that would eventually lead to my all-encompassing argument that the Internet, like most other forms of media, was not capable on its own of persuading voters. I let the project drop when I couldn't figure out how best to write it clearly, and when I realized the amount of energy it would take wasn't worth the four or five visitors I was averaging a week.

And why do I bring this up? Because the next post, had I not given up the topic, would have been on mitigating factors, those pesky little things that keep TV campaign ads or stump speeches from convincing us to back candidates. One of the most important mitigating factors of all, when it comes to the effects of media on voter behavior, turns out to be "influentials," or, as they used to call them back in the 1940s, opinion leaders. Which just happens to have been part of this week's class discussion.

So now I'm going to (briefly!) try this again. Today, a short background of opinion-leader research, and tomorrow the specifics of why this week's class speaker got the details a little bit off.

In short, digestible bits, here's how opinion leaders came to be studied:

In the late 1940s, a bunch of guys from Columbia wrote "The People's Choice" and a few other pieces in which they attempt to examine the role of the media in elections. Remember, this is coming right around World War II, which saw remarkably effective use of propaganda on the American population, and people were starting to be a little bit freaked about what all that new media watching was doing to their kids.

The Columbia folks basically went at the study questioning most people's fears of media as a hypodermic needle, which sent messages essentially into the brains of a comatose audience. Yeah, I'd be scared, too.

What they found instead, though, was a two-step flow of information, from the message creators to the opinion leaders, and then finally to the mass audience. Sound familiar?

A caveat: There were a lot of problems with the original study, which took place during the 1940 campaign cycle, and dozens of researchers since then have argued its merits, including the original authors who a few years later developed a second study. I'm not even saying whether I agree with the study, I'm just bringing all this up because we read/talked about it for class this week and I like taking an opposite point of view.

2005-07-12T22:34:00.000-04:00

In class tonight, someone made the type of comment we’ve heard over and over again: Blogs are great because they did X, and without blogs, X wouldn’t have happened. The example this time was the bike lock story that circulated a while back (last summer, maybe?) , and the sentiment was that without the blogs telling everyone how easy some $150 bike lock was to pick with a simple ball point pen, the news wouldn’t have spread. (Whether that’s a good thing or not is up to bikers and would-be bike thieves to figure out.)

But, like we’ve often done in this class, I think we give the blogs too much credit. When the news was spreading, I was by no means even a moderate blog reader, and yet I knew about it. So did my mom, who reads blogs even less than I do. I heard about it from friends who read bike magazines, or I heard about it from CNN, which actually picked up on it pretty quickly. Yeah, some guy figured out how to steal a bike and posted the directions on the Web, but the events that followed were not unique to the dynamic world of the Internet.

I guess this is just yet another reminder, to the people in the class and to the entire world, not to give blogs too much credit for taking part in a campaign or cause that was getting along just fine without them.

Why I'm not really crazy

2005-07-11T19:11:00.000-04:00

Contrary to the last post, I'm not really crazy. I do think it's important and pathetic that 68 percent of the people online live in North America and Europe while two billion people around the world don't have enough electricity to power a water pump, let alone a laptop. And as I've said in an earlier post, I find it remarkably telling (though not at all surprising) that of those of us who are online, the loudest voices screaming for attention tend to be male. Any way you want to describe it, there is a digital divide in this world, whether it's between those who have access and those who don't, or, once they get there, whose voices get to be heard most often. We have a moral and ethical obligation to get the latest technology into the hands of those who cannot afford to buy it for themselves, and to understand that they know how to use it for more than just e-mail.

All I was trying to say last time is that I'm not in favor of discussing the in-vogue term like "digital divide" out of context from all the other things that lead to it.

But here's a good thing about the digital divide: leapfrogging. The basic concept is this: Developing nations have been shut out of the first wave of technological developments during the last few decades, so now that things have been simplified a bit from the early days, we can bring the developing world online far more quickly and with more success than the Western nations managed. A nation only has 10 phones per 1,000 people? Don't bother laying down more phone lines, just work on getting the nation's cell towers up and running.

I guess I'm far more excited about ways to bridge the digital divide than I am by simply talking about it ad naseum, which I seem to have been doing in at least two of my three classes each semester for the last year. I think the problem I have with the digital divide (and maybe one I didn't articulate so well in the last post) is that so many people just bring it up and leave it at that.

Five of my classes at this year have at least mentioned the digital divide, yet only one mentioned any of the steps our society can take to help bridge it. I hope my experience isn't representative, because if all we're doing is talking about the problem and never even sparing the time to mention some of the solutions, maybe my anger from that first post is right on target after all.

Are we not divided?

2005-07-08T18:55:00.000-04:00

So what's my problem with the digital divide?

It ignores real problems facing the electoral and communications systems in our country. Someone doesn't have access to the Internet? Yes, *that's* why they're an uneducated voter, not because the candidates fail to spark any real interest in our electoral process. They don't know the very latest information about the workings of our government? Yes, it's because they don't have access to blogs 24/7 and not because they have more important things to do during the hours they're not sleeping, eating, caring for their children and working two minimum-wage jobs to put food on the table for kids they never see.

The "digital divide" as a concept came into vogue in the mid-1990s, right when the earliest mainstream adopters of the Internet were hearing the words "You've got mail" for the first time. But, and I wish I could remember where I first heard this because I'd surely link to it, it's really just a new phrase to describe the very old chasm between those who have information and those who don't. From the printing press to the QWERTY keyboard, technology has been used by the privileged classes to consume information that the rest of society cannot, either because they cannot afford books or because they cannot pay the cost of a high-speed Internet connection.

Again, I'm NOT saying the divide doesn't exist, I'm just saying it's not exclusive to the digital age, and it's not something that's going to change no matter how many high-speed connections we put up in rural areas. Again, I'm NOT saying we shouldn't put them up; I'm just saying we shouldn't expect them to solve our problems.

And that's probably my biggest problem with the "digital divide" -- it fools us into thinking that if Microsoft donates 1,000 computers to an inner-city school, or if your cable company donates some fiber-optic lines and labor to get the elementary school in the middle of nowhere hooked up to the Internet, that all of our nation's problems will slowly begin to heal. Is that all it takes? Is helping some kid in New York or Selina, Kansas, check his e-mail faster all we really have to do to live in a better country?

Yay 2

2005-07-07T20:48:00.000-04:00

Yay 1

2005-07-06T20:48:00.000-04:00

(un)divided

2005-07-05T20:36:00.000-04:00

As I said a few weeks back, I’ve never been much of a fan of the digital divide, the concept or the book. I appreciate its place in the literature and canon of recent media and technology discussions, but, like so many other highlights, I’ve always felt that it’s ignoring the big picture. Maybe that’s because I think anything devoted exclusively to the Internet and technology is only a smaller piece of a larger communications pie. It’s an especially pertinent belief, I guess, when the subject is something that concerns those who aren't necessarily getting an equal share of the technological pie.

My posts the next few days are each going to focus on one of the many problems I’ve had with the theory over the years since I first encountered it. A few of these are arguments I’ve hatched in previous posts.

Don't get me wrong, please. There are a LOT of people and a LOT of voices that are being silenced for lack of access to technology. But even if we evened the technological playing field, do we really think the Internet would be a utopian place where all voices would be given an equal share? I doubt it. There are bigger societal problems here than whether inner city youth have access to the Internet (which, again, I am SO TOTALLY IN FAVOR OF, so please don't misread me), and I feel like sometimes we just blame everything on the "digital divide" so we don't have to figure out what's really wrong with our country.

A little thanks goes a long way

2005-07-02T22:47:00.000-04:00

Emi links to an article asking why Congress doesn't blog, and I at first was going to respond with some comments basically agreeing with the they-have-no-peers-to-mimic argument the author makes. I mean, she's got some good points, that blogs would take valuable time from lawmakers' staffs, that most constituents would bother to read them anyway, et cetera. Yet again, most lawmakers are behind the curve, which is right where we'd expect them to be. No big news there.

But then Norton gets to her final point, that there are ways for lawmakers to connect with the blogosphere besides actually maintaining a blog. Norton mentions a few politicians who have posted messages of thanks to blogs who've supported their causes and such, and it hit me: Lawmakers need to be doing this. Fine, don't maintain your own blog, be baffled by the technology, worry about your message coming across wrong, but at the very least if you know there's a group of highly involved, engaged and active people out there, why the hell aren't you taking two seconds out of your day to tell a staff member to thank them? Would it really be that hard to add a once-a-week post on Kos or something from a senator just thanking the people for caring?

Electorate dismissed

2005-07-01T22:17:00.000-04:00

I am not alone in the last few years in wondering what the advent of instant electronic communication has done to our relationships with other people. Sure, it's easier to get in touch with one another, but it's also quite easy to dismiss an e-mail from someone you don't want to deal with. Example: A friend with whom I'm not on such good terms sent me an e-mail, and I skimmed it over my morning cup of coffee one day and decided I'd stew for a while before responding. Six months later, that message is way, way way down at the bottom of my in-box and I've yet to respond. Would I have responded by now if he'd sent me a printed letter or card?

What this means for our political system is still up in the air, but I have a sneaking suspicion that e-mail will not be the great tool that will bring our representatives closer to us as it has for grade school classmates or friends of friends of friends. I don't have much faith that lawmakers read every piece of printed mail that arrives in their offices, so I pretty much have less than no faith that they read even 5 percent of the e-mails that fill their intern's Outlook boxes.

Johnson offers a (somewhat frightening) brief history of the House and Senate e-mail systems, but every time I turned a page I stopped to wonder if any of it mattered. My senator could have the best e-mail system ever designed, but I still don't think he'll read any messages I send to him, let alone consider the contents.

It's a start

2005-06-30T23:14:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-27T21:33:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-26T20:40:00.000-04:00

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?

2005-06-26T00:35:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-25T22:58:00.000-04:00

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...

2005-06-25T22:16:00.000-04:00

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?

2005-06-21T00:23:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-20T23:43:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-20T10:52:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-20T00:15:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-19T00:18:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-18T21:26:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-18T19:46:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-17T00:05:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-16T10:09:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-15T11:40:00.000-04:00

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?

2005-06-15T11:33:00.000-04:00

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$%#@!&

2005-06-14T21:41:00.000-04:00

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...

2005-06-13T23:15:00.000-04:00

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?

2005-06-12T10:59:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-11T18:50:00.000-04:00

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?

2005-06-10T00:30:00.000-04:00

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?

2005-06-09T19:09:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-09T10:50:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-09T00:15:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-08T15:48:00.000-04:00

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?

2005-06-08T13:46:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-08T12:30:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-07T22:23:00.000-04:00

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

Why the Internet won't persuade voters

2005-06-07T21:50:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-06T06:17:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-05T18:59:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-05T17:41:00.000-04:00

...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

2005-06-04T09:42:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-03T21:16:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-02T17:11:00.000-04:00

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

2005-06-01T20:24:00.000-04:00

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.

A point about mobilization...

2005-05-31T00:15:00.000-04:00

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?

2005-05-30T00:01:00.000-04:00

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

2005-05-29T07:38:00.000-04:00

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

2005-05-26T09:23:00.000-04:00

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

More by Tuesday.