shouting loudly

Once again, it’s time for a reassessment of what the web is good for. In political communication research, we tend to make a hardline distinction between political persuasion and political mobilization.  In simple terms, persuasion is the act of convincing someone to change their position on a topic (which candidate they support/whether climate change is real), [...]

It’s been a whirlwind news cycle over the past 48 hours.  Welcome to the 21st century surveillance state.  We’ve been living here for some time, but no one bothered to say so until now.  In grappling with it all, I keep returning to a few literary classics. Neil Postman begins his magnum opus, Amusing Ourselves to [...]

[The real point of this blog post is just to encourage you to read George Packer's article (ungated version here.  But c'mon, subscribe to the New Yorker already).  It's the best thing you'll read this month.] I read a lot of technology criticism.  I write a bit of it as well.  George Packer’s article in this week’s New Yorker, [...]

Michele Bachmann released a 3AM video last night, announcing that she’ll retire from Congress rather than seek re-election.  In classic Bachmann style, the video is a hilarious mashup of low production values.  She keeps an upbeat tone through the entire 8-minutes, with encouraging head-nods even when talking about the moral decay of the country and [...]

Change.org is in the business of distributed citizen politics, and business is good. News broke today that Change.org has raised $15 million in outside funding, mostly from Pierre Omidyar.   From Liz Gannes, who broke the news: Omidyar Network is taking a minority and non-controlling stake with the explicit disavowal of a future payday from [...]

I’ve just gotten around to reading Nicholas Lehmann’s New Yorker piece, “When the Earth Moved.”  Lehmann compares today’s environmental movement to the 1970 Earth Day-era environmental movement and, of course, finds it wanting.  It’s an easy critical piece to write, and the prose is well-constructed.  But I found the whole thing pretty underwhelming. Lehmann is trafficking [...]

Today in the New York Times “bits” blog, Nicole Perlroth brings us the latest cautionary tale for those who want trust online metrics a little too much.  Titled “Fake Twitter Followers Become a Million Dollar Business,” the article documents the growing market for fake follower numbers. You can buy 1,000 followers on Fiverr for $5. [...]

We talk a lot within the Internet politics research community about “technological affordances.”  It isn’t a very common term outside of our small circles though.  There have been a couple of clips from The Rachel Maddow Show this week that I think help demonstrate just how important a concept it is, though. Visit NBCNews.com for [...]

Wow. I didn’t have any respect for Tucker Carlson to begin with.  But I assumed he was above this, at least. On November 1, days before Senator Robert Mendendez (D-NJ) faced reelection, the DailyCaller led with a story of two prostitutes in the Dominican Republic who claimed they’d slept with him.  They produced video testimony [...]

Over at DailyKos, Markos Moulitsas offers a spirited defense of what I term the theory of “ideological congruence” in partisan technology adoption. There’s a reason that conservatives have fallen so far behind liberals on the technology front, and it truly is cultural. Go read Wired or Ars Technica or The Verge or any gadget blog [...]