My old friend Dean Karlan wants YOU to help improve online advocacy — he’s one of the folks behind a site called stickK.com that that aims to get people to follow through on their commitments by entering into a binding contract, and he’d like to look at how this model will affect online advocacy. Become a guinea pig and you’ll help advance the art and science of motivating supporters — and you might just reach some of your own immediate goals along the way. Details below:
Hi Pat, how’s things these days? Don’t know if you’ve heard about it, but there’s this device out there now called the “internet.” An interesting idea: the ‘net can put your words in front of a large audience. In the old days, you could say something relatively inflammatory, even in print, and generally have it read or heard really only by people who already agreed with you or at least shared your basic attitudes. Nowadays, though, someone like, say, Media Matters can pick up one of your columns and distribute it to a very different group of readers, including a few who might not share the assumptions underlying a statement like this, which you wrote yesterday in response to Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright’s now-famous screed:
America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.
Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.
Now, I’m not going to go into great detail about how I think you might just be missing the point, though I will suggest that perhaps you’d be more persuasive if you considered the question of whether anyone ASKED those “black folks” whether or not they wanted to be brought in chains to the New World, kept in servitude for centuries, stripped of their cultures and their very names and forcibly converted to an alien religion. Oh, and largely trapped in relative poverty and second-class citizenship up until my lifetime, and I ain’t that old. But I digress.
Newt Gingrich is moving to Silicon Valley! At least, part of his American Solutions organization is: the nonprofit is setting up a “technology headquarters” near the Stanford Linear Accelerator (e.politics is jealous — we want a death ray in our backyard, too). An American Solutions blogger touts the value of being so close to the perpetual nursery of new technology:
“We’ve established an office in Silicon Valley because we want to be in the middle of innovation and entrepreneurship and gain firsthand knowledge of the latest technological developments that will continue to change online politics. In short, we want to utilize new technologies that will help us communicate and organize more effectively — before it becomes a trend.”
Um, yeah. Newt, let’s you and me go grab a drink sometime and chat about the distributed nature of online communications.
Maybe nobody else thinks this is interesting, but to me it’s fun to realize that as I write this, I’m mixing the oldest and newest widely adopted wireless communications media: radio and wifi. I’m a-sittin’ in my chair, pulling the ‘net from a wireless hub hooked to a cable modem while also listening to WAMU radio’s live election coverage. I could stream the NPR station over the ‘net, but it’s easier to listen to if it’s on in the background. And for live local coverage, Kojo, Jonetta and the gang are fun as hell and also happen know a whole lot about local politics, so you can learn a ton. I’m going to check out the Post’s live online coverage in a bit; they seem to have poured a lot of resources into it. Anyway, thanks Mr. Marconi, for the wireless. Update: The Post thing is basically TV on the web; if you like TV news coverage hosted by print journalists, you’re their demographic.
What IS the relationship of blogs and professional journalism? Are they friends? Enemies? Uneasy neighbors? The question comes up because last week e.politics was chatting with some visiting German journalists about blogs and the roles they’re playing in the American political and media world. Some of them had questions similar to common concerns of newspaper professionals in the States a couple of years ago, for instance how does a newspaper site integrate and market blogs, and how do sites handle objectionable content? Some seemed more rooted in the unique concerns of the German political world: what is the potential for far-right or other extremists to hijack mainstream media properties? And, should extreme political voices even HAVE a place in the online public discussion?
But one newspaper editor asked a blunt question that should be familiar to just about anyone trying to produce things online for a living: at what point will people will stop paying for content at all, because they can get what they want online for free? With newspapers watching subscription rates fall, classified ads move to the web and big advertisers disappear in a wave of retail consolidation, a fear of the web and of blogs is natural. But besides their obvious economic threat, bloggers are also usually amateurs, and in the hauteur of professional journalists toward their pajama-clad cousins, there is an echo of the disdain of a knight or samurai toward a low-born musketeer.
Huddled in the e.politics bunker this week with a cold and a big pile of (very welcome) work, I took a little time off from the site to focus on the logistics of living. At the same time, I also wasn’t happy with anything I thought of to write about — every idea that came up seemed derivative. Looking back at the last month or so of posts, I realized that the usual mix of pieces on advocacy, elections and (occasionally) digital political culture had swung almost entirely over to election coverage, and that too often I was basically chasing the story rather than trying to write something original. It’s no coincidence that the handful of stories that covered electronic advocacy more broadly were the ones most picked up by other blogs — they didn’t just follow what was being written elsewhere.
Next time I should listen to my own advice and not get caught up in the horserace. There’s a lot more to the world of electronic political advocacy than the U.S. presidential elections, fascinating as they are. That being said, some election-related pieces are in the pipe, though I hope they’ll be part of a more varied stew in the weeks to come.
In the political world, it’s easy to demonize the other side. Those bastards want to abolish the social safety net! Those freaks want to let men marry men! We often forget that, in most cases, the freaks and bastards aren’t being evil but instead sincerely believe that they’re working to make the world a better place.
If you’re involved in politics, regardless of which side you’re on, you likely started doing it because you wanted to advance some noble goal. Of course there are sleazoids out there, and of course humans are very good at rationalizing actions whose results will be bad for the rest of us, but I honestly believe that the majority of people in the political world are acting out of a reasonably sincere desire to improve things. Very few of us are villains in our own stories or our own minds.
With that reminder, let’s take a second to look at one of those moments when a person and his words really did change the world, when someone did succeed in making lives easier and prospects brighter, when someone did help make this often-ugly political process yield to a higher cause. On MLK Day, take a few minutes to watch, to listen and to dream of futures better.
In the spirit of not wanting to kick a dog when he’s sad and ailing, I have avoided saying anything unpleasant about Unity ‘08 in quite a while. But an email today from its founders endorsing Michael Bloomberg has forced me to reconsider that silence and lean back into a fighting stance, prepared for some Chuck Norris-style ass-whoopin’.
Ron Paul’s appearance on Meet The Press last Sunday was immensely revealing for many reasons, not the least of which was his success (in the words of The Smirking Chimp) at “parrying each of Tim Russert’s attempts to find a gotcha moment with honesty and conviction — two things Russert was obviously unpracticed in dealing with.” What really jumped out at me, though, was what the interview revealed about the limitations of traditional political journalism as practiced in this country over the last century. It ain’t for nothin’ that newspaper and television reporters and pundits have steadily lost audience over the last decade to a new army of amateurs and outsiders — a world of information scarcity is being replaced by a world of information plenty, and political journalism’s place as the arbiter of public discourse is eroding fast.
With many of our online colleagues taking the holiday week off, it’s time for e.politics — temporarily ensconced deep in the Piney Woods of East Texas while measuring the Pulse Of The Heartland — to take up the slack. And maybe to finish off a few articles that have been screaming for conclusion for weeks.
But first, let’s connect some dots international-style, with a nod to the globalization instincts of How The World Works. What does a European rocket launch from Guiana have to do with the rise of global people power? When an Ariane 5 boosts an African communications satellite into orbit, plenty. The Rascom consortium — dig the animated intro with an excellent backing track — aims to bring new digital communications access to telecom companies and internet service providers across this tragically most unwired of continents.
And based on a Netsquared presentation from Kim Lowery of Kabissa back in September, they should see plenty of demand. Among other things, she talked about how people in one small town, lacking a ‘net connection, would type out emails and give them on disk to a car owner who would drive them weekly to the nearest city (hours away) and send them to the wider world, returning later with the replies. THAT’S being hungry for communications.
Political implications? In countries where even the basics of government spending are closely held secrets, information that we in the industrialized world take for granted can be revolutionary (remember Google Earth and Bahraini corruption?). For a hint of the new potential, see this Post piece on modern campaign tools’ spread to Kenya (note that Dick Morris unfortunately went along for the ride). And while cell phones are still much more common than computers in the Third World, the tubes are coming: I got my first look this weekend at the one-laptop-per-child XO machine, courtesy of my father, who’s taken advantage of the give-one/get-one holiday offer (my brother and his IBM-Linux-guru wife have done the same). The user interface seems clunky, but the wifi works and the next generation of the software promises to be much more straightforward. Just you wait until these little critters and their descendents overrun the globe….
Just got a “breaking news” alert from The Politico that Barack Obama has accused the Clinton campaign of engaging in “the old ‘Swift boat’ politics,” using as evidence a Bob Novak piece from earlier today that claimed that Clinton was holding scandalous material on the Illinois senator, refusing to use it in public, but spreading rumors about it behind the scenes. The Novak article ran in Human Events rather than in the columnist’s high-profile perch at the Post, but it spread widely over the Web, no doubt in part because it appeared on Drudge. Obama’s statement is quite strongly worded, as is the Clinton campaign’s response (delivered by email), which basically accuses Barack of being such a callow youth that he’ll fall for an obvious Republican dirty trick.
Regardless of where the truth lies, and it’s going to be interesting as hell finding out, what jumps out at me is the sheer speed of this transaction, particularly for a Saturday. Those of us in the online advocacy community often talk about using this tool and that tool to help mold opinions or win votes, but what I wrote after last year’s mid-term election still stands: the most important effect of the Internet on politics comes from the unfathomable volume of information now available and the speed with which it can spread. The existence of electronic networks has utterly transformed all forms of communications to the extent that we hardly notice it anymore, and the aggregate effect of all of our actions online far outweighs their sum alone. All of which is another way to say, damn, that was fast.
A chat I had with a couple of folks from Radio Singapore International this weekend called up something that’s been playing around in my head for a while now: the idea that we’re seeing the birth of a host of alternative political organizations (and cults of personality) that are outside the power of traditional political gatekeepers to control.
The radio journalists were asking questions about MoveOn.org, an organization that’s propeled itself into the stateside eye lately because of the “General Betray-us” NY Times ad. What jumped into my mind, though, was something said at a recent panel discussion on presidential campaigning: that Wesley Clark has retained a political presence in large part because his email list/online fan club will still turn out in some numbers for causes and candidates that he supports.
I’ve been looking for a good reason to return to last week’s question of online political etiquette, and fortunately commenter Ron Goodwine provided an excellent excuse when he left this note yesterday on the original original e.politics Graeme Frost story:
So long as the Dems can find off limits people to fight their battles, the GOP is just SOL? You can’t be serious!
The Dems have made an art out of finding people who “can’t be challenged” to spout their talking points. Like Ann Coulter, I’ve had more than enough of it. The fact is, the Dems USED that kid and they should be condemned for it.
Since that series on the 2008 online challenges is taking a just a bit longer than planned to pull together, let’s whet your appetites with a little history lesson. I wrote this next article back in the Spring of 2000 for the website PoliticalInformation.com, then a targeted search engine for politics and policy I was helping to start but now a ghost site six years dead. The topic? Using the Internet for politics (crazy talk!), with a panel discussion by several experts as a hook.
What’s particularly interesting how is how little the basics have changed even as the tools evolve. Well before widespread broadband adoption, Web 2.0 and social media, we still needed to integrate online and offline communications, put out good content, give people a way to take part, and create mechanisms to keep in touch with them and encourage activism. Sound familiar? (more…)
Eight months down; fourteen to go: since the online component of campaign 2008 kicked off in January, we’ve seen Hillary as Big Brother, Ron Paul as favorite son, Mike Gravel as crazy uncle, Obama drawing admiring eyes, a talking snowman drawing ire, McCain for gay marriage, Romney for abortion, Giuliani for prom queen and every candidate for as much online sugar as he or she can raise.
What have we really learned, though, about the challenges of political communications in a networked world? The era of broadcast communications is fast fading, and a world of niches and low barriers lies ahead. At the moment, the presidential campaigns are feeling their way across the same foggy ground as every other online communicator. Where have they stumbled? What obstacles and opportunities lie ahead? What will it take at all levels of politics to win in 2008 and beyond? This series of articles will look at these questions, using our experience of the last 8 months (and a dozen or so years) of online politics as a guide.
I hate to agree with Jonah Goldberg on anything, but…
Okay, it’d be an exaggeration to say that I side with his recent LA Times op-ed about online politics, but I agree that the rise of the political Internet ought to inspire anything but complacency among progressives and liberals.
Ever since the explosion of progressive political blogs and the rise of the Dean (and later Kerry) fundraising machines, some on the Left have been patting themselves on the back. It’s the people versus the powerful! We’re crashing the gates! The populist Left has a natural advantage online! Josh Levy may call this argument a straw man, but I’ve been hearing variants of it from quite a few people over the last four or five years, and it’s always made me nervous. When you’re ahead, the other guy’s probably right at your back — and sharpening a knife.
While Republicans and Democrats are spending almost equally on their Web efforts, Democrats are spending dramatically more on in-house staff. Approximately 36% of the Democrats’ Web budgets are dedicated to staff, while less than 8% of the Republican budgets are. Overall, the Democratic candidates have 39 people working in the Web departments while Republicans have 18, spread over 9 active candidates. That works out to an average of 5.6 staffers per candidate on the Democrat side, and just 2 on the Republican side, encompassing both frontrunners and also-rans.
[…]
Most disturbingly, it shows that we are not investing in the human capital needed to drive our online efforts forward. If we can’t innovate in a competitive primary environment, when can we innovate? The Democratic nominee will have access to nearly 40 bright minds who have direct Presidential campaign experience, and the Republican nominee will have access to less than half that.
Thinking ahead past 2008, this staffing inequity could have serious long-term effects. When you look at the progressive/Dem online politics world, veterans of the 2004 Dean and Kerry campaigns are hard to miss. Joe Trippi, of course, but also Zephyr Teachout, Zack Exley and the Blue State Digital folks. Ditto for EchoDitto, and I’m sure for quite a few others. These people are helping campaigns NOW and also training a whole new cohort of online activists for 2010, 2012 and beyond. Each skilled web person has a potential multiplier effect, as he or she moves on to other campaigns or into the advocacy world.
The Republicans started this cycle behind the Democrats in overall online experience (with notable exceptions like Patrick, David All, Matt Turk and Mindy Finn), and if senatorial and congressional races follow the presidential campaigns’ current pattern, that imbalance seems likely to persist for years to come. Consultants can help, but it’s in their interest to hoard rather than to spread knowledge. Skills multiply best when widely distributed — wildfires spread faster if they start from more than one spark.
