Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Candidates are of course very busy but I think it's really just a
matter of priorities.  After all, in the end, they aren't too busy to
try to communicate with voters, and so they make time for press
conferences, speeches, TV and radio appearances, interviews with
reporters, and so on.  Blogs apparently aren't as important as those
other things, but that could change.
  

    
> Howard Dean did not win in Iowa or New Hampshire.

True, but Dean has gone on to build an organization that's taking
control of the Democratic party. 

> The online subculture is an elite. 

The Pew Internet and American Life Project's statistics show that
almost 70% of American adults are online, and that percentage is
growing. A recent breakdown of who's online is available here:
http://www.pewinternet.org/trends/User_Demo_05.18.05.htm

It's precisely because adoption is high and increasing that the
Internet is now a significant factor in elections. Check out
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/150/report_display.asp for more info.

> Multinational corporations own a big chunk of the net and the 
> other new technologies.  Their mass news media outlets have 
> co-opted blogs and webspace.

No one actually owns the Internet. I'm not sure where you get the
impression that "blogs and webspace" have been coopted. David Sifry
notes that there are 40-50 thousand new blogs every day, or one every
two seconds (http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/002752.html), and
I'd say most of the top 100 blogs are still independent, as are most
blogs in the blogosphere. 
  

    
> Blogs apparently aren't as important as those
> other things, but that could change.

I agree, and I think that'll happen as we get more candidates who are
comfortable posting their thoughts online. I look forward to the first
candidates who are experienced bloggers.
  

    <scribbled by silly Wed 6 Jul 05 04:58>
  

    <scribbled by silly Sat 7 Jul 12 17:43>
  

    
Other relevant data points: the percentage of actual voters who are
online (I don't think anyone's gathered that statistic), and the
percentage of political influentials that are online (see
http://www.ipdi.org/UploadedFiles/political%20influentials.pdf).

>>> Howard Dean did not win in Iowa or New Hampshire.
>>
>> True, but Dean has gone on to build an organization that's taking
>> control of the Democratic party.
>
>That's a good thing?

Unless I misunderstood the issue you were raising, whether it's a good
thing or not is irrelevant. If you're questioning whether Dean was
effective in building support, you have to look past the primaries, and
you have to consider other factors... e.g. though his supporters were
organizing effectively online, those efforts didn't really mature in
time to have an impact on the primary, but they continued after his
losses, and organized the precinct-level support that led to his
current role as leader of the Democratic party.

> Most of those "almost 70% of American adults" are not Howard 
> Dean fans and will never support him no matter how hard you 
> try to win them over.

Er, maybe so... but that's not really relevant to the discussion. The
discussion here is about politics, democracy, and the Internet.
Regardless of our political preferences, the relevance of Howard Dean
is that his campaign demonstrated how the Internet might be used to
organized grassrooots support effectively and build a following that is
more "emergent."

> Who do you think owns high speed cable access?

High speed cable access isn't the Internet, though, it's just a mode
of access. In fact there's a movement to facilitate "freedom to
connect," which isn't just about an individual's freedom to connect to
the Internet. It's also about the freedom of municipalities to offer
network access to their citizens, and the freedom of smaller service
providers to offer network access and services using existing networks.
I think I alluded to this above. There is a significant movement to
expand access to broadband and ensure that access is not ultimately
controlled by a few monopolistic (or duopolistic - phone and cable)
service providers. (e.g. see http://savemuniwireless.org)

As for blogs, there's not much data to show us how well they sustain,
who reads them, or how they're read. I asked Michael Cornfield of the
Pew Internet and American Life study recently if they were planning to
gather data on how readers read blogs, and he said they're just getting
into a study of bloggers... they haven't got to the point where
they're considering readers. I think I mentioned earlier in this
discussion that we don't really know enough about how people read
blogs, and how assumptions about the meaning of blog stats are suspect
until we have that data.  We also don't have a real understanding of
the power law distribution of blog readership, but the long tail is
clearly relevant - i.e. significant mindshare is committed to the
millions of little-read blogs. Though a few "a-list blogs" have
appreciably more readers than blogs below, the *aggregate* of blogs
below the "a list" is where much of the action is.
  

    
I dunno. I can see blogs as disruptive, and I can see otherwise 
incendiary folks getting very popular by telling people what they want to 
hear (which may actually be cutting edge news, but more often will be the 
next Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh), but I just don't see very many blogs 
having very much say on the political process. We haven't changed as a 
society, we've only introduced a new medium. I don't know that blogs will 
change the general power structures any more than desktop publishing did.
  

    
The Dean campaign famously proved that on online campaign is an
effective way to raise money and recruit volunteers.  So at least one
thing has changed.

On the other hand, Steven Levitt apparently wrote some papers
(summarized in Freakonomics) showing that raising money in politics may
be less effective than conventional wisdom has us believe. 
Apparently, when the same two candidates run against each other in
consecutive elections, the amount of money they spend makes little
difference.

"A winning candidate can cut his spending in half and lose only 1
percent of the vote.  Meanwhile, a losing candidate who doubles his
spending can expect to shift the vote in his favor by only that same 1
percent.  What really matters for a political candidate is not how much
you spend; what matters is who you are."
  

    
Ari: I think the value of blogs is less visible if you think of them
as individual projects. The alternative is to think of them as an
aggregation of voices. I can't think of a single blog that's made a
political difference, but I can think of situations (e.g. calling
attention to Trent Lott's implicit racist remarks, Sinclair
Broadcasting's alteration of "Stolen Honor") where many bloggers
focusing on the same story or issue had an impact. 

Brian: candidates raise money primarily to buy effective broadcast
campaigns; the question is whether the top-down broadcast model will
prove less effective than a more bottom-up, grassroots approach
mediated by effective use of interactive applications on the Internet.
The thinking behind Deanspace was to build many sites for Dean
supporters organized by geography, affinity, or whatever... community
sites that could be networked effectively to support Dean's candidacy.
As I implied earlier, I think that effort didn't work, not because it
wasn't potentially effective, but because it would take more time.
Deanspace sites were appearing too late, and there were too few of
them, to have the intended effect.
  

    


Aldon Hynes writes:




Thanks for the kudos, Jon.  Brian is right about the matter of priorities.
Blogs haven‚t gained the level of importance as other forms of
communication.  Any good politician will employ a wide mix of modes of
communicating with voters.  Blogs are important, so is door knocking.

Some of the reason blogging remains a smaller part of the media mix is the
perception of the online culture as being an elite subset.  Jon is right to
point out the importance of the political influentials as noted in the Pew
report.  However, I like to encourage political bloggers to step outside of
the traditional circles and try to connect with other parts of online
culture, such as mommy bloggers, food bloggers, etc.
  

    
Jon, I'm still not convinced. Bloggers as a smartmob is/was a phenomenon, 
but I'm less convinced that we'll see blogs have as much influence, even 
in aggregate, next cycle. By then it will be something new. Already, it 
does seem as though people speak more cynically of what bloggers say or 
do.

On the other hand, tools like Drupal/CivicSpace do provide a neat 
framework, at least in theory, for enabling non-profits to do a better 
job of fusing online/offline presences in a good way.

I guess what I'm saying is that I see blogs as one element in the ways 
that we enmesh each other as intersecting sets of community, but that I'm 
not convinced that they represent such a big change (other than the 
leverage Dean got in being the first to figure out how to use the 
internet to tap grass roots).

Or, a better interim answer to the question might be connected to 
what/how MoveOn.org, or organizations like it, is doing in terms of 
organizing these days. Are they still as visible relative to paper 
fundraising/crowdraising as they were a year ago?
  

    
Ari, blogs are just starting to catch on with campaigns, and it's got
so that my company seldom gets a request to build a campaign site that
doesn't include a blog as a prominent part of the infrastructure, and
you saw Sifry's numbers above. Blogs aren't exactly new, they're just
web pages, after all.  What's new is the lack of friction in publishing
online... virtually anybody can be an author/publisher with the blog
applications available today.

I think you'll also see more applications similar to meetup, and more
house parties, i.e. more offline conversations that are facilitated by
online applications.

CivicSpace looks promising, though it's not quite what you would call
easy to use at this point.  That's the goal, though.

MoveOn has been very effective at raising money and collecting email
addresses, and it's still rocking on. However it tends to be an
extension of the top-down broadcast approach to politics. 

I don't doubt that you hear cynical remarks, even from bloggers, but
there's always cynics. 
  

    <scribbled by silly Sat 7 Jul 12 17:43>
  

    
What strikes me as most interesting on the "extreme democracy" front is not
what exists now or did exist recently (hence, not the pros and cons of the
Dean campaign), but what might exist soon and thereafter. It seems to me
that blogs don't have to take the place of The New York Times for it to be
true that blogging dramatically changed political discourse.

The most interesting prospects are how blogging and meetup-type tech and
whatever things come next intersect with the big, traditional mediasphere
and with politics as usual.

The social networking pieces in the book deal with that, as does Blaser's
"The Revolution Will Be Engineered" (in a different way), and your own
"Virtual Bonfire." Could you expand on the themes there a bit, Jon?
  

    
Britt's engineering the revolution via his new company Open Resource
Group, LLC (ORG) and its product-in-development, ORGware, which he
describes as "a web-based framework for organizations that want to
attract members and which are brave enough to cede control to the edges
of the groups that form, spontaneously, around their organization."
He's been talking about a Vote Delivery System (VDS):

"VDS is a supply chain. Currently there are two competing supply
chains for votes, each owned by the local political parties: hence
their tyranny over people running for office. Sure, the politicians
spend a gazillion dollars trying to route around the local parties,
hyping themselves with expensive ads. Broadcast politics is like the
direct-to-consumer ads that transformed Big Pharma in the 1990s. But
like Big Pharma's sales force schmoozing the physicians, politicians
can't ignore the local parties' power to prescribe for its user base.

"Let's transform retail politics as Amazon transformed retail. Like
Amazon, the trick is perfecting the VDS fulfillment system, as package
delivery has been innovated into an obvious and hassle-free appendage
to the eCommerce experience. Our new company, Open Resource Group, has
devised an architecture to deliver voters to their polling places as
systematically as UPS puts an Amazon book in your hands (not as
reliably, but as systematically). Like Amazon, we don't care what book
you buy, based on what value system. We do care that the online
experience brings out your preferences and causes you to invest in
delivering your vote to the right polling place on Election Day." (From
Britt's blog, Escapable Logic, http://blaserco.com/blogs/)

That's one future technology, and it come from Britt's thinking about
a "campaign in a box" (as he refers to it in his chapter). This is
where you see more than new technology transforming politics: Britt's
technology development is an expression of his vision of a politics
that is really of the people. In the same item on his blog, he says
"Let's make American politicians as irrelevant as the British
monarchy."  The politicians become less relevant because the people
they represent carry more of the energy of the political process, and
the politicians are decreasingly isolated from their constituents,
because we have more channels for communication and more voices to
communicate. We don't toss the governance framework we have, because
it's really workable. We fix it by augmenting the process with
technology that facilitates civic engagement, citizen input to the
political process. We insist that legislators listen and respond... but
we also have to figure out how to do that without overwhelming them.

Am I answering your question? There's a lot to say... we could also
talk about blogs and journalism and how they relate, shall I get into
that?
  

    
W.o.w. I'm reeling a bit, and trying to turn off the synaptic firings that
amount to a voice shouting "Vote buying! Fix! Fix! Corruption!" in my head.

Can you say something about how Vote Delivery System differs from paying for
votes? (Or maybe Mitch wants to -- I gather he's landed.) And, yes, I'd be
interested in learning how the loop is closed with journalism in the new
media.
  

    
I think you misread that one, Bruce. The Vote Delivery System is about
getting *your* voters to the polls, i.e. the people who already
support your candidacy. If you have 65% support, but only 8% of your
voters show up to vote, you'll lose the election, despite the fact you
were more popular. (To that end, the concept of "customer relationship
management" has been adopted as "constituent relationship management"
by political campaigns and nonprofits.

***

You might think that bloggers and journalists are natural enemies, but
that's not the case. Journalists are beginning to see bloggers as
another source, and may partner with them in the future. (That was the
vision of Krista Bradford's Center for Online Investigative Research -
http://coir.smartcampaigns.com/). And, of course, there are various
experiments in citizen journalism, such as Dan Gillmor's Bayosphere
(http://www.bayosphere.com/).
  

    <scribbled by silly Sat 7 Jul 12 17:43>
  

    
Hopefully, the Online News Association's blog will be of interest.
<http://www.cyberjournalist.net/>

"How technology, blogs and the Internet are changing the media" says
writer/editor/publisher Jonathan Dube.
  

    
The piece in the book most specifically relevant to blogs as
journalism is Jay Rosen's "The Weblog: an Extremely Democratic Form in
Journalism."  He says "the genius of the weblog was not in any
technological leap, but in completing the last mile in the two-way
highway the Web has become. The form favors individual voices and
self-publishers, most of whom will have no media institution behind
them, and no hope of profit. What they are after is free speech and the
enhancement of public life. Or as Tim Dunlop puts it, 'an environment
where ordinary people can use argument to increase their knowledge.'"
He goes on to say "Weblogs potentially explode the world of authorship
far enough that we can at least imagine a sphere of debate with
millions of productive speakers, where there was once an audience of
millions listening to a few speakers dominate the debate."
  

    
Voter delivery isn't just get out the vote, though -- or not just get-out-
the-vote-of-those-who-spontaneously-agreed-with-your-well-thought-through-
positions.

The whole campaign in a box is interactive, and it's about connecting with
potential voters in ways that motivate their support at the polls (and their
support in motivating others' support).

In the "chaste" version of such a process, the motivation comes about
because the candidate and voters agree on policy. But that's true of the
"chaste" version of the electoral system we have: candidates advertise their
views, and voters choose the package they prefer.

What keeps the whiz-bang, peer-to-peer version of electoral politics from
being unclean in all the ways the current system is (and new ones, too)?
Why would candidates avoid barter of some form? Isn't it tailormade for
multi-level-marketing-style abuse?
  

    
I can think of several ways to respond. One is that, in the
peer-to-peer approach, we look for a higher degree of transparency, so
the snake oil should be very visible. Another is that we're looking for
a degree of participation such that social pressure to behave in ways
that are "chaste" would be greater.

But like current system, this form of politics will be both clean and
unclean. It's not a panacea - people will be people and we'll always
have ethical lapses, errors in judgement, etc. As I said earlier, this
is a messy and inefficient form of governance we're talking about.
Facilitating broader participation in governance is not something you
do because it's easier, because it's way harder.  You do it because
it's right, because it's consistent with the democratic promise we keep
making to ourselves and the rest of the world.
  

    
Jon, what's the potential for using a reputation system to cut through
the babel of fact, fiction, opinion, and spin on the net?
  

    
I think it would be somewhat helpful to be able to see how each different
interest groups rates the reputation of each communicator. It's something I've
started suggesting gently to people at technorati.

So when you see a post, you can immeadiatly see how the poster stands with:
 - Pat Roberston
 - The New York Times
 - Technorati
 - Jon Lebkowski
 - Your mother
 = Etc.
  

    
Reputation systems are definitely in the mix, though they can also
contribute to the echo chamber effect, e.g. if we assign reputation
based on agreement rather than more objective determinants. And let's
say you have a system wherein users assess and assign personal
reputation based on the quality of posts, and someone makes a few posts
that aren't well-regarded. Their reputation is set low, therefore
users no longer see their posts, and they have no opportunity to
reclaim reputation.

Slashdot's system is good - reputation is assessed by moderators for
individual posts rather than users, and metamoderation provides a check
on moderators' judgement.