…Yaaaaaaawn…

I’ve written about the relative lack of conservative online infrastructure in the past, in a conference paper titled “Don’t Think of an Online Elephant” (available here).  Short version: about once a year, every year since 2003, some conservative activist has tried this.  They get a round of media stories similar to this one in Politico.  Then eight months go by and they get another round of media stories, about how they failed to produce anything. Reporters are Charlie Brown, conservative elites are Lucy, and these organizations are the football.  Every time conservative elites announce “hey look, we’re gonna have our very own MoveOn,” a few journalists take the bait.  Then they write about how the whole thing ended up falling into the dirt, take a few months to forget the whole episode, and then again hear “conservative MoveOn,” lace up their shoes, and start rushing.  There’s never a reference to how or why the last attempt failed.

Liberty.com claims to have a list of 70,000, and given that it’s being organized by Eric Odom, a prominent tea party leader, that’s easy to believe.  But MoveOn has 5,000,000.  Suffice it to say, 70,000 ain’t 5,000,000.  And Liberty.com openly admits that it hasn’t done anything yet.  They plan on launching September 1.  Right now it’s a splash page with a cheaply-produced embedded video and a sign-up list.  When you sign up, they send you an immediate fundraising request.  (“Oh Charlie Brow-own…”)

There’s an interesting tidbit at the end of the article, where Liberty.com spokesman Yates Walker indicates that “January’s Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, which struck down the law banning corporate spending in elections, paved the way for the new group’s formation.”  Um, what?  Citizens United affects corporate spending on elections.  That’s not MoveOn-like at all.  Nothing in the decision impacts the ability of “patriots” to build an internet-mediated political association.  Either Walker doesn’t really know what he’s talking about or else Liberty.com is aiming pretty explicitly at being a funnel for large corporate donors, with a shop window that looks grassroots-y.  Having never heard of Walker before, I can’t evaluate which is more likely.  But if a journalist wants to do some actual investigation, that would be the spot to do so.

Either way, here’s my suggestion for journalists when covering “right-wing moveon(s).”  Wait until they do something, anything that merits reporting.  At least make sure that there’s a “football.”  Eric Odom hasn’t done anything yet.  He’s created a webpage, announced an aspirational goal, and sent out a press release.  At this point, he’s just looking for free publicity, presumably so he can convert it into cash.  How is that the least bit newsworthy?

And by the way, I’d be happy to talk at length with reporters about the development process of these types of organization.  It would be great to see serious reporting on how the Left and Right netroots organizations differ, or on why digital activism isn’t as simple as throwing a webpage up or launching a facebook group.  But it’s much more likely that we’ll see 4 more stories like the Politico piece in the next week or so, followed by eight months of silence and then a story about how Liberty.com didn’t really work out in, say, March or April 2011.  Lucy. Football.  Dirt.  Works every time.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0810/41262.html#ixzz0x5HgTWpl

UPDATE: Politico published a follow-up story today.  The title (MoveOn unfazed by new group) is unsurprising, but the body of the piece actually gets into the trouble that conservative organizations have had in duplicating the organization’s success.  Credit where credit is due, that’s some decent reporting.

Netroots Nation has become a standing appointment for top elected officials.  Past years have featured presidential debates (’07), Senate primary debates (’09), and keynote speakers ranging from Bill Clinton (’09), and Al Gore (’08) to Nancy Pelosi (’10), Howard Dean (’07), Harry Reid (’10) and Al Franken (’10).  Several Senators and Representatives show up on panels as well.

The public image of the netroots depicts a horde of angry leftists, critical of the Obama administration and other elected officials.  Given this parade of key decision-makers, you’d expect some fireworks from the audience.  ”Harry Reid is gonna be there?  Let’s break out the big, cool puppets!”  ”Pelosi will be speaking?  Let’s harangue her over single-payer!”

In the four years that I’ve attended the convention, only once have a seen this sort of action from the crowd.  It was ’08, I believe, and a small group of Code Pink protesters showed up and unfurled a banner during a lunchtime keynote (I forget who the speaker was).  The audience basically self-policed, giving them cold stares and shouting them down until they were escorted out of the room.  That style of radical, “speak-truth-to-power” activism just isn’t well-received by the netroots community (at least when directed at allies).

Three notes about this point:

1. Just because the netroots don’t embrace protest tactics against their guest speakers doesn’t mean they aren’t asking tough questions.  Harry Reid may have had the quote of the weekend when he said “I’m told that I get on your nerves.  And I’m here to tell you that you, at times, get on my nerves.”  The formats for these speakers generally include an interviewer/moderator on stage and questions from the audience, so there is a lot of room to move beyond stump speeches and delve into substantive criticisms.  Joan McCarter raised Don’t Ask Don’t Tell immediately with Reid and presented him with Lt. Dan Choi’s West Point Ring.  After Reid stutteringly accepted it, Choi, stood up in the front row, saluted him, and stepped on stage to give him a hug.  Given the stutters in Reid’s acceptance, I’m pretty confident that the moment hadn’t been rehearsed with him in advance.  That’s pressure politics, just conducted in a more artful manner.

2. The netroots aren’t as mad at Obama as you’d think.  They’re frustrated, sure.  There’s a lot of strategic and tactical criticism.  They’d really like to see Elizabeth Warren appointed to head the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection.  But the common refrains from the weekend included “filibuster reform” and “motivate the base before November.”  This audience would like to see more bold and progressive policies from the government they helped elect, but they’re also very focused on the structural factors that have made enactment of such a policy platform difficult.

3. Netroots =/= bloggers.  I’d estimate that maybe 40% of the convention attendees raised their hand when asked whether they blog.  It’s probably closer to 30%.  ”Netroots Nation,” includes a wide array of digital activists — MoveOn, Democracy for America, PCCC, Living Liberally, Credo Action, Media Matters, Center for American Progress, Sunlight Foundation, and Organizing for America all show up on the panels and in the audience.  The conference is also well-attended by labor groups, and by some traditional issue groups.  Blogging is one component of the netroots repertoire, and it certainly remains an emblematic activity, but we can no longer draw a simple equivalence between “bloggers” and the netroots.  It’s a lot more complicated and interesting than that.

All-told, the image that comes out of direct interaction with the netroots is very different than what you’d get from either mainstream media or much of the academic discourse.  In particular, I don’t think a group like the Sierra Club could pull off events like this without attracting an influx of Code Pink-style protesters.  Some combination of community norms and technological affordance allows the DailyKos community to signal to outspoken radicals that “this isn’t the place for you, it’s a big internet and you should go self-organize elsewhere.”  The legacy organizations, even ones with a decidedly mainstream grassroots base, have historically been a lot less comfortable/effective at communicating this signal.

That the Tea Party Federation expelled Williams demonstrates that someone in that crowd possesses at least a modicum of common sense with regards to damage control.  It also doesn’t make one whit of actual sense.  What has Williams actually been expelled from, exactly?

The Tea Party “Movement” has no core.  There is no central document, no charismatic leadership (excepting Republican leaders like Palin, Bachmann, Armey, etc), no clearly-defined borders between in-group and out-group.  The National Tea Party Federation is one of dozens of organizations to hoist the “tea party” banner.  It holds no greater claim to the mantle of movement leadership than Williams’s own Tea Party Express does, though.  As far as I can tell, the two have been equally involved in setting up tea party rallies across the country.  Other groups like the National Tea Party Convention are for-profit operations, pretty blatantly trying to make a quick buck off the tea party meme.

All of this noise points to a real problem for researchers and public intellectuals trying to take the tea party seriously.  There’s been some solid work done with surveys, but those by their very nature capture tea party supporters rather than tea party participants.  Take it from a longtime environmental organizer: there’s a huge gap between the throngs of people who will state from the comfort of their home phone that they agree with you and the motivated partisans who will actually show up to an event.  Surveys can’t tell us what this “movement” stands for.  Leaders can’t tell us either, because the tea party leadership is indistinguishable from Republican/conservative thought leadership.

Furthermore, in the ever-increasing echo chamber of present-day media ecology, it becomes almost impossible to separate tea party as a meme from tea party as a movement.  Any conservative fundraiser not invoking the tea party frame needs to have their head examined.  That language has more gold in it than Glen Beck’s dwindling advertising base.  Looking at Tea Party Conventions that receive wall-to-wall coverage but only bring in 500 participants, I have to wonder if the tea party is more media phenomenon than grassroots uprising.

That’s not to say that there aren’t grassroots conservatives mobilizing in opposition to Obama today.  There are, and they self-identify as part of a “tea party movement.”  But we had outbreaks of grassroots conservatism under LBJ, Carter, and Clinton as well.  When the Democrats control the White House, we get an upwelling of grassroots conservatism.  Something isn’t a new “movement” if it as predictable as the tides.  And as far as I can tell, the difference between this tea party and the 1990′s grassroots conservatives lies in echo-chamber amplification — Fox News talks about them nonstop, so does MSNBC.  The Washington Times and the Washington Post both spill plenty of ink on the topic, as do DailyKos and Redstate.

And all of that media attention means that Mark Williams probably hasn’t been kicked out of anything at all.  No one can stop him from continuing to claim to be a tea party movement leader.  There’s a slight chance that Fox News will stop booking him in order to help distance the Tea Party from charges of racism, but if someone offered an even-money bet as to whether he’ll be booking gigs at conventions and on political talk shows within the next 6 months, I’d bet the answer is yes.  His Tea Party Express has just as much claim to the mantle of “tea party movement” as any of the other organizations out there… which is to say that no one has much claim to that mantle to begin with.

Coverage of the Tea Party is the equivalent of high-fructose corn syrup in our political media diet — filling, cheap, unhealthy, and everywhere.

This oil spill is a tragedy.  We don’t know the scale of the tragedy yet, but the options appear to range between “really really big” and “cataclysmic.”  It’s occupying a large portion of the media agenda, as well it should, and it appears to have attracted the national conversation like no environmentally-related tragedy has since Katrina.

When polling on this issue, it seems to me that pollsters face a pretty basic issue.  Do we, the people, approve of the Administration’s handling of the disaster?  Well, the oil is still gushing, and we’d reaaaaaaally like it if SOMEONE would (pretty please) stop it from gushing.  So that’s probably a no.  Like the Saturday Night Live skit from last year, the baseline reaction that any poll is going to pick up right now is “Fix It!”

That’s different from public opinion on Katrina.  There, the hurricane had ended.  A disaster had occurred and the question was “do you blame the federal government, local officials, both, neither, etc.”  In this case, the disaster is ongoing. And while we’d all like someone to Fix It, it’s unclear whether we think that’s the government’s role, BP’s role.  We expect the government to build levees.  We don’t generally expect it to plug leaks miles into the ocean floor.

My point is that, like Harwood, I’d hold off on calling this “Obama’s Katrina” or focusing on electoral implications just yet.  And certainly, any poll data discussing approval of “Obama’s handling of the situation” should be viewed with suspicion at this point.  Polls are useful for discerning changes in the gut reaction of the populace.  That gut reaction right now can be summed up as “my God, can somebody do something, please?!?”  So long as the oil is still spilling, any poll question about the spill is going to pick up negatives because the situation just continues to be alarmingly, depressingly bad.

—–

Lt. Governor Bill Halter’s attempt at unseating Senator Blanche Lincoln in the Arkansas Democratic Primary came to an unsuccessful conclusion last night, with Lincoln winning the runoff by a 52%-48% margin.  I’ve been following this campaign for several months, particularly because of the high level of netroots involvement.  While I largely agree with the post-mortem analysis offered by Kos, I’ll add a few thoughts of my own below:

First, we should be clear about how we arrived at last night’s election: Blanche Lincoln is an extremely conservative democrat, the type that motivated partisans are bound to hate.  She has stood against her party on every major legislative initiative, often vocally so.  She was a major thorn in the left’s collective side during the debate over Health Care Reform and the Public Option.  She’s also plenty unpopular in her own state – Nate Silver currently predicts a 92% chance that she loses her reelection bid in November.  Those two factors create fertile ground for a primary challenge.

If she was conservative-but-popular, there would be a strong argument for leaving her alone — Senators are meant to represent the interests of their constituency, and some states have more progressive constituencies than others.   We can call this the “Doug Hoffman mistake,” after the tea party candidate in NY-23 who lost a special election race for a seat held by Republicans for over a century.  Rand Paul, Pat Toomey, and Sharron Angle all may turn into telling examples of this mistake by the end of the 2010 election season.

If she were progressive-but-unpopular, then of course progressive advocacy groups and the party apparatus would be well-aligned for devoting major resources towards defense of the seat in the general election.

As a conservative Dem with essentially no chance at reelection, however, progressive advocacy groups are awarded a “free shot” of sorts.  Send a message to other Democrats that they can’t take the activist base for granted.  Signal to elected officials that there are positive incentives associated with being a progressive champion ($$$, volunteers, media attention, organizing support) and negative incentives associated with representing corporate interests.

In practice, the fight between Halter and Lincoln played out as a battle between the party apparatus (with Bill Clinton and Obama’s Organizing for America both attempting to galvanize support for Lincoln) and the advocacy community (with organized labor spending $10 million in the primary and the netroots — MoveOn, Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Democracy for America, and DailyKos — raising $3.5 million for the candidate).  Immediately after Lincoln was announced the winner, an anonymous “senior White House Official” took a potshot at the activist base, claiming that “organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members’ money down the toilet on a pointless exercise.”  That senior White House Official is, frankly, some combination of  petty and stupid.  Labor and the netroots can now present a much more credible threat to the most conservative members of the Democratic congressional majority, based on their record of coming within inches of primarying Lincoln, despite cover from Clinton and Obama.  That’s money  (and volunteer-hours) well-spent.

I’ll have more on this in a month or two, focusing on specific actions of the netroots groups and the ongoing blurring of the lines between party organization and advocacy organization.  In the meantime, I’ll just note that, though a win last night would have been rewarding for the netroots, the final outcome does little to diminish the long-term impact of their actions.  In the grander scheme, this primary was about networked activists sending a message to the party apparatus.  Message sent, message received.

Let me start by noting that I see nothing wrong with the study itself.  The CRS counted the total number of MoCs on twitter in September and October ’09, counted total tweets, categorized by content-type, and packaged it all into reader-friendly graphs.  It’s exactly what the CRS is *supposed* to do, and I’m not objecting to it.

But the media framing is a little bit silly.  Consider this passage in the Christian Science Monitor piece:

“It’s the House that’s the Twitter GOP hotbed. Fully half of the Capitol Hill Twitterverse is composed of House Republicans. Obviously they’ve got some organized Twitter strategy going on in the GOP caucus. (emphasis added)

Is it only Decoder that finds this counterintuitive? It’s Democrats who are the party of young people (who text a lot), and Change, with a capital “C,” and MoveOn, and Web-based fundraising, and so forth.”

The problem here is that “get more MoCs to tweet” isn’t a strategy, per se.  Generally speaking, strategy involves making choices about the mobilization of resources to accomplish, y’know, a goal. Furthermore, the Democratic coalition does include lots of young people, MoveOn, web-based fundraisers, etc.  But the success of those actors has very little to do with Tom Perriello’s (D-VA) twitter activity.  CRS isn’t looking at the Republican and Democratic coalitions, it’s looking at Republican and Democrat Congressmembers.  Those Congressmembers, on average, don’t even have a very large following (the median House member had 1,297 followers, the median Senator had 3,536 followers), and we have no information on how frequently they are actually interacting with their followers.  Bottom line: if more Republican elected officials are contributing content in 140-character bursts… so what?

This isn’t to dismiss Twitter’s utility in the broader social media universe.  I’ve been amazed at how twitter has evolved in the past year and a half.  It’s now an important means of directing traffic to blogs, with an astonishing clickthrough rate.  But Twitter is an ecology in which communities of practitioners can interact and spread information.  Raw numbers of accounts or tweet totals just aren’t very interesting or useful data.  In the rush to embrace the newest and shiniest of the social media tools, twitter is also a bubble, being misapplied in areas where 140-character bursts just aren’t all that useful.

*If* Republicans actually rule Twitter, we should see that show up in meaningful action rates.  Show me twitter-directed donation numbers, or twitter-mediated protest activities.  Those are areas that have genuine strategic importance.

It’s entirely possible that Republicans do lead in these areas, but we can’t tell from the CRS study.  That wasn’t its purpose or design.  In the meantime, it would be great if journalists and the twitterati would tone down the rhetoric a bit.  We have no evidence of Republicans “dominating” or “ruling” twitter.  There are just more  Republican Congressmembers using the microblogging tool.  That’s a little interesting, but hardly newsworthy.

Still from a recent Apple launch

In his iconic novel “1984”, George Orwell envisioned omnipresent “telescreens” in every home, business and on every street that could be monitored by the government.  These screens were especially powerful because the subject never knew when the screen was being monitored or if, in fact, monitoring ever occurred.  One had to live as though one were watched at all times.

As is often the case, truth seems to lie somewhere between the totalitarianism of Orwell’s “1984” and the hedonistic consumer dystopia of Huxley’s “Brave New World.” As two recent stories point out, our actual telescreens cost hundreds of dollars and have designer labels.

The useful GPS technology that allows us to navigate our way through city streets also allows government agencies to track our movements.  Not in theory, but in practice.  A recent story notes that agencies have made rampant use of cellphones to track the physical movements and identities of individuals.  As long as we are not up to any wrongdoing, who cares?  Except that the definition of “wrongdoing” is a tricky one.  One Alabama sheriff used the technology to track his daughter’s whereabouts when she stayed out too late.  Even more unsettling is the story of Michigan police who used the technology to note the identities of protesters at a labor union rally.  And these are just the abuses that had been reported thus far.

Having taken part in many marches and protests during the Bush years, I observed that police utilized cameras as weapons of intimidation, recording the faces of each and every protester for purposes that remain unknown.  Did they do this to create a record or merely the belief that such a record might exist?  Was their object to record identities, prevent illegal activity or to intimidate peaceful protesters?  In any event, it seems that these tactics have moved from digital cameras to mobile telephony.  So while tools like Twitter and text messaging have been used by protesters around the world to organize and mobilize, mobile telephony may be just as useful for officials to monitor protest and “chill” dissent.  

 Meanwhile, do you know that little camera that sits on top of your computer screen or laptop–the one that may be pointed at you right now?  How do you know that nobody can see you through it?  If that seems silly, then you should read this story from CBS News about a high school sophomore who was spied on in his home by his school using the webcam in a school issued laptop.  In this case, the danger is that this technology is not only exploitable by overeager officials, but by child predators either within the school system or who may hack into the school’s system.  That is, it might not only be Big Brother who is watching, but Big Pervert.  The FBI is investigating the incident, but it is unclear if they are looking for wrongdoing or pointers.  

 When a Philadelphia mainline school district starts taking pages from the playbook of Orwell’s Oceania, privacy advocates and consumers should take note.  With mobile computing on the rise, hundreds of millions of Americans are using objects that may be used to track their movements and to view their lives.  As cameras and GPS systems become more prominent in these devices, there is every reason to suspect that our personal devices may not be as personal as they seem.

Academic associations tend to be politically conservative.

I don’t mean they revere Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman, though plenty of scholars do. Rather, each group–representing a field’s professors and graduate students–tends to evade controversy, rarely taking a public stance on an issue that might divide the membership.

Thus, it is remarkable that the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) has declared its support for network neutrality.

The issue is too important to stay on the sideline any longer.

AEJMC represents a diverse group of scholars who research and teach nearly everything related to mass media. Based on our research–and, in some cases, years of industry experience–we know the media business, and letting ISPs pick online winners and losers is bad policy.

Nearly all revolutionary internet ideas–from Amazon and Google to Skype and Twitter–came from cash-strapped outsiders. Somewhere in the world right now, another tinkerer is developing what might become the next big idea. Before it catches on, though, ISP demands for a broadband toll might strangle this idea in its crib.

Also, some of the best stuff online never turns a profit. Imagine if, in 2001, Wikipedia had to pay through the nose just to compete on a level playing field with Encarta. It may have stalled, and even today, forcing Wikipedia into the slow lane would harm and might kill the project.

AEJMC is also concerned about the slow death of the daily newspaper’s business model. We embrace the internet age, but we also hope to ensure financial viability for “print” journalism. ISP tolls would make this much harder.

MSNBC and FoxNews could afford to pay extra for the rapid delivery of rich, interactive media. Most newspapers could not, forcing them to choose between deeper debts and worse user experience. Citizen journalists and exciting nonprofit experiments would also be muted by ISPs.

In addition to concern about the media system in general, we also have a selfish motivation to support network neutrality: Our roles as scholars and teachers. Academics in all disciplines depend heavily on the internet, and most of the educationally valuable content is not backed by big corporations.

If ISPs choose winners and losers online, the online content we professors assign would not often win. Would ISPs bend over backward to ensure my students’ access to the PDF of James Boyle’s Creative Commons-licensed book? Or the Internet Archive audio of WWII-era radio broadcasts?

Boyle and Archive.org are great, but I don’t expect them to pay off Verizon just to make my students’ downloads faster. This means my students have less access to educationally valuable content, they learn less, and the educational value of the internet drops. The same will be true of my research productivity.

As students of the media system and as researchers and educators, we have deep value and respect for the neutral internet. It is a privilege to have contributed to the drafting of the AEJMC statement, and I thank AEJMC President Carol Pardun for having the courage to lead this charge.

P.S. As if ISP profiteering weren’t enough, other interested parties are muddying the issue. The copyright industries, for instance, are desperately trying to force and cajole ISPs into serving as the copyright cops.

P.P.S. In the interest of full disclosure, I am the co-author (along with Minjeong Kim of Colorado State) of a research project examining the online framing of network neutrality. This project won a competitive research grant from AEJMC, though this is in no way related to my long-established opinions on this issue.

Now, the statement is out, and I’m listed as a contact. Later today, thanks to the good eye of Josh Stearns at Free Press, I’ll be writing a post for the SaveTheInternet blog.

Here’s the text of AEJMC’s statement on net neutrality:

AEJMC Supports Net Neutrality

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

January 26, 2010

Contacts:
Carol Pardun, AEJMC President (803) 777-3244, pardunc@mailbox.sc.edu
Bill Herman, AEJMC Member and Media Law Scholar, (215) 715.3507 (mobile), billdherman@gmail.com

AEJMC Supports Net Neutrality

The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) urges the Federal Communications Commission to adopt rules preserving open and nondiscriminatory access to the internet.

The debate about network neutrality is complex and contentious, but we wish to address a specific myth advanced by network neutrality opponents: that this regulation would stifle innovation and create disincentives for investment in next-generation broadband networks.

The AEJMC rejects this claim.

The most important internet innovations have not come from network providers, but from creative outsiders who built their inventions on top of a neutral network. Requiring network neutrality is vital to preserve competition and investment in internet content, services, and applications.

The FCC should codify the internet openness principles that already guide the agency, and Congress and the courts should support this move. The rules would protect both consumers and innovators of content, services, and applications from unfair discrimination by internet service providers. Perhaps most importantly, these rules would help preserve and develop the internet as a key tool for communication that serves our democracy.

This statement was issued by the President of AEJMC and through the President’s Advisory Council.

Related links

* Federal Communications Commission
* Network Neutrality (Wikipedia)
* “Net Neutrality” in the news (Google)

About AEJMC

The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication is a nonprofit, educational association of journalism and mass communication educators, students and media professionals. The Association’s mission is to advance education, foster scholarly research, cultivate better professional practice and promote the free flow of communication.

# # #

I hope all my progressive groups and friends remember #Haiti today. I’d be bummed if they didn’t.

Mattzie has backed up the talk himself, pledging to match up to $1,000 in disaster relief donations from his fellow twitter-donators.  As the day has progressed, I’ve already seen online appeals from Color of Change and MoveOn (both urging their lists to donate to groups such as Oxfam and Doctors without Borders).  Nothing so far from the single-issue political advocacy groups, though of course Red Cross and others have appropriately sprung into action.

I don’t mean this to be a critique of the single-issue groups, but it does bring one point to mind that bears examination.

In the presentation that I’ve been giving about my research, I use the phrase “Headline Chasing” to describe the distinctions between MoveOn-style targeted fundraising and the direct mail funding appeals that fueled advocacy groups for the past 40 years.  It’s an intentionally provocative term.  The new generation of advocacy groups organize around whatever issue is at the top of the public agenda, whereas the earlier generation of groups mobilize around specific issue topics, regardless to their immediate salience.  That proves very effective as a fundraising tactic, but it implies a sort of nimbleness and fluidity that may or may not be such a good thing.

I think today’s fundraising appeals are an important example of the unquestionably positive side of this “headline chasing.”  MoveOn isn’t making a buck off this tragedy.  They are mobilizing their large supporter list and asking them to help out through other organizations.  When tragedy strikes, tragedy rules the headlines.  And in that moment, unless the tragedy impacts an issue group’s central focus, the large majority of organizations remain silent, clearing out of the way while the red cross and others take center stage.  The new political economy of advocacy organizations allows the progressive netroots to get behind the red cross, doctors without borders, and other center-stage organizations and quietly help out.  Internet-mediated organizations are performing mitzvahs right now, because their structure allows them to.  Older organizations, progressive or not, remain sidelined because the logic of their structure demands it.

Let’s hope that organizations, governments, and individuals do all they can to come together in the wake of this tragedy.  A 7.0 earthquake is a reminder of just how fragile many social institutions actually can be.  Unpredictable tragedy like this can happen anywhere, and national boundaries should not stand in the way of efforts to aid our fellow human beings.