e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics

Archive for June 18th, 2010

Beach Reading: “Share This” and “The Upper House”

Time for the first official 2010 Epolitics.com summer reading recommendations! Both books featured today are written by friends-of-epolitics, which though not a prerequisite for recommended status sure doesn’t hurt. First up:
Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking by Deanna Zandt, blurb below.

The times are not just a-changin’, they’re a-revolutionizin’! As social media becomes increasingly present in our everyday lives, a major democratic cultural shift is underway. Through the power of relationships, sharing of experiences, and organizing online, previously marginalized voices are pouring into and shaping public conversations like never before. But serious change will not happen on its own. Despite the increasing presence of a diversity of voices and faces, the Internet isn’t fulfilling its disruptive potential; more often than not, it’s simply replicating and amplifying inequality and segregation.

Enough technology for one beach trip? Next up is The Upper House, a look inside the U.S. Senate through the eyes of several senators elected in 2006 and 2008, written by Terry Samuels, an epolitics drinking buddy who’s formerly an editor at TheRoot.com and who also covered Congress for US News and World Report. You can read a Bob Kerrey review from the Post plus plenty of others, or just jump straight in and order it at Amazon. Terry’s also hosting an event at Kramerbooks on Monday for the DC set; I’ll see you there. Congrats, y’all! Great work on the dead-tree-media front — perhaps one day we’ll join you there.

– cpd

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Email is Dead! [Again]

Here we go again — yet another pronouncement of the death of email, this time by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (see video below). Allyson Kapin has an excellent response on Frogloop, and I’ll just note that way back in 2006 one of the first posts on Epolitics.com dealt with predictions of email’s demise, a subject we’ve revisited time and again since (once with Chuck Norris!). Honestly I’ve run out of things to say on the subject, other than that email was the killer app in politics in 2006 and again in 2008, and I don’t see a whole lot of reasons it’s going to change fundamentally in 2010.

Besides noting that predicting the death of email is a sure-fire way to get media attention (particularly if you’re a company that might stand to benefit from such a development), I’ll just close with a cautionary tale for would-be futurists — if I remember correctly, online guru Seth Godin predicted the death of email advocacy within five years at the GetActive user conference…in 2005. Looking around from the vantage point of 2010, I don’t see a whole lot nonprofits and political campaigns ditching their email lists — in fact, I see plenty of people trying to grow them as fast as possible. Of course email will continue to see a gradual and RELATIVE decline, since so many other online channels now compete for our attention, but I find it hard to believe that we’re going to ditch such a near-ubiquitous and immensely practical tool any time soon. And you can quote me on that.