I like the video.  It’s not going to get a million views or radically change American jurisprudence or anything, but it’s a well-executed communications tactic – fun and informative, appealing to the audiences who are likely to engage in further collective action on this topic.

The video got me thinking about the nature of online virality.  For the video’s producers, “going viral” is a premise for a joke.  Specifically, “cat videos go viral, serious commentary doesn’t.”  There’s truth there, but it’s inexact.  The lion’s share (har, har) of cat videos don’t go viral.  Last month, video of an Iowa man giving testimony about being raised in a loving family by two women did go viral.  So one perspective on virality can be described as common wisdom.  As is usually the case, common wisdom has a nugget of truth behind it.  But it’s also very limited and approximate.

The academic research on virality tells us a couple of things.  Kevin Wallsten’s study of the Will.I.Am “Yes We Can” video found that there’s significant interplay between blogs and traditional news media in driving viewership.  Karine Nahon’s research on viral videos in the 2008 election specifically zeroed in on the influential role of a few megablogs (DailyKos and Huffington Post, in particular) in driving viral views.  Put another way, most viral videos don’t trace the path of “David After Dentist.”   When hub sites with a large viewership highlight a video, attention is magnified. The Iowa testimony video was driven by MoveOn promoting it to the frontpage, posting it to Facebook and Twitter, and emailing their 5 million+ list.

But what content can or should a hub site emphasize?  If the choices of a MoveOn or a Huffington Post drive virality, then what influences those choices?  I would call that a third perspective on viral content – the organizational perspective.  Daniel Mintz, a MoveOn staffer and Rutgers alum, kindly agreed to speak to my students last month.  At one point in the discussion, he explained that MoveOn has a simple equation that they use to determine what goes viral.  He drew it on the chalkboard: Virality = (see) x (share) x (come back).  With any piece of content, the organization monitors how many people are clicking on the item to begin with, how many then share it with others, and how many of those others then click as well.  This is data that they can gather, manipulate, test, and act upon.  It informs their decisions, which in turn affect what goes viral, which in turn impacts common wisdom.

None of these perspectives is holistic.  Each has limitations.  And each deals with a different form of virality.  Jokes about the Wallsten/Nahon concept of online virality wouldn’t be very funny.  Studies of mass viewership trends cannot also dig into organizational choice.  The equation that MoveOn relies upon is probably different than the one used by Huffington Post, and necessarily sacrifices sophistication for usability.

Any complete answer to questions about viral content online would have to start with “it depends on what sort of virality we’re talking about…”

In the prologue, he raises the following question:

“…should a professor who is shaping the discipline’s discussion through her mighty participation in online and social media get tenure even if she hasn’t published sufficiently in peer-reviewed journals?”

This gets talked about a lot in the circles I inhabit.  Speaking as a professor-who-blogs, my answer might surprise you:

No.  Or at least, Not Yet.

I do believe that more academics should blog.  Blogging offers both extrinsic and intrinsic rewards to academic researchers. It pushes us to write clearly for an audience, sharpening our writing and thinking.  It provides immediate gratification, sorely absent from the peer-review process.  It raises your profile within the field, which can yield additional research opportunities.  It lets you speak to wider audiences, which can help allay bouts of existential angst and answer difficult questions during holiday visits with relatives.

My own blogging experience has been positive in all these ways.  Most of my peer-reviewed articles have begun as blog posts (“Understanding Blogspace,” “Macaca Moments Revisited,” “Online Political Mobilization from the Advocacy Group’s Perspective,” and “Implications of the Mobile Web for Online/Offline Reputation Management” all got their start at shoutingloudly).  I’ve also enjoyed the experience of attending conferences and being told “oh, I read your blog post last week.”  As a young scholar in a nascent field, it still comes as a shock to learn that someone other than my mother reads this thing!

I generally try to write out an idea when it is fresh.  Sometimes it gets helpful feedback from readers in the comment section.  More often it just forces me to clearly explain what my point is.  After months of losing myself in the research, this provides a lodestone of sorts.  Being able to go back to the initial impetus sharpens the mind and helps you dig an argument out the mess of data.

Perhaps more importantly, blogging helps to shape my research agenda.  The process of writing for an audience leads me to flesh out lines of thought that otherwise would stay murky.  Those, in turn, drive the course of my research.  Being an active blogger makes me a more active scholar.**

That said, we should acknowledge two limitations on academic blogging: it is bite-sized and it is not (yet) a central forum in academia.

1,000 words is long for a blog post.  Most posts are more like 500-750 words.  An academic article, by contrast, will run between 6,000-10,000 words.  Hyperlinks mediate the difference somewhat — instead of devoting column-inches to describing competing arguments, you can link to them online.  Still, peer-reviewed research represents a level of detail that blogs don’t reach.  A good research article delves into complexity in ways that a good blog post cannot and should not.

I have had plenty of ideas that appeared ironclad in 600 words.  It was only when I attempted to write them in 6,000 words that I saw problems crop up.  This is a good thing — nothing sharpens the mind like realizing “huh, I guess I was wrong about that.”  But for this reason, peer-reviewed articles ought to remain the “coin of the realm,” where tenure and promotion are concerned.

Likewise, academia is a slow-moving professional field.  As my friend C.W. Anderson remarked to me, “ours is the only profession that is paid to think slowly.” That is also a good thing, but it means that the discipline is institutionally conservative and tends to adopt new communications media reluctantly.  As a result, while there are some great academic blogs out there, none meet Weinberger’s standard of “shaping the discipline’s discussion.”

Peer-reviewed articles enjoy a privileged position in tenure, promotion, and hiring decisions.  That’s because peer-reviewed articles are where the various disciplines’ discussions occur.  We assign one another’s articles in the classroom.  We cite one another’s articles in our research.  We attend conferences centered around early versions of these long-form research articles.  This may very well change in my lifetime, but it isn’t going to change anytime soon.

So no, I don’t believe an academic who excels through blogging and social media ought to receive tenure on that basis.  Academics ought to blog and tweet, and they can benefit from doing so.  But those benefits ought to translate into improved long-form research output.  If those benefits fail to translate into research articles, I would consider that reason for serious concern.  We are supposed to think deeply and rigorously.  Blogs and twitter can aid such thinking, but they provide a tricky venue if not augmented by lengthier articles that have gone through the (sometimes brutal) process of anonymous peer-review.

—-

*This is a great season to be an internet politics geek… new books Weinberger, Clay Johnson, Rebecca MacKinnon, and Joseph Turow are all hitting the shelves.  I’ll post some reviews to the blog as I make my way through them.

**Within limits.  I blog 2-3 times per week at most.  If I was blogging 2-3 times per day, I can’t imagine finding time for much else.

I’ve written about these Google-Group listservs* before, particularly surrounding the 2010 JournoList/Weigelgate controversy.  These e-mail lists make up a hidden network architecture for the progressive netroots.  There are (probably) thousands of them.  They can be set up (and taken down) within minutes, and Google’s architecture makes them technically impossible to taxonomize.  They’re useful for promoting discussion and debate amongst clusters of networked individuals — people who work on the same thing or have similar interests, but aren’t working for the same organization or based in the same location.  Think of them as watering hole conversations, but digital and more diffuse.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with network backchannels.  They’re a useful and utterly sensible tool.  But one of the interesting things in the JournoList controversy was that conservative activists elevated them to full-fledged Boogeyman status.  The claim was repeatedly asserted that (1) this was proof of a “liberal media conspiracy” and (2) that no such lists exist on the Right.

I took on the first assertion in a paper for the 2010 APSA Annual Meeting, “Beyond Citizen Journalism: Weigelgate, Journolist, and America’s Shifting Media Ecology.”  It’s a silly and outlandlish argument (it persists on Tucker Carlson’s site, the Daily Caller.  That says more about Carlson than it does about the assertion, though).

The second assertion always struck me as unlikely.  ”Really, there are no conservative Google-Groups?”  Why the hell wouldn’t there be?  They’re easy-to-create, pretty useful, and occasionally fun, after all.  But since they’re technically impossible to find (you don’t know about them unless they’re “leaked” or you’re invited to join), it wasn’t an assertion I could directly disprove through research.

Well, here’s the proof.  The Freedom Community is a network backchannel.  Apparently its a pretty secretive one (not surprising, given how conservative activists demonized Journolist).  That’s their choice, and I’ll go on record saying that its unlikely its being used for any genuine conspiracies.  But anyone keeping score ought to take note: the Right uses these same Network Backchannels.  They just stay quieter about them.

*Interesting lesson from my copy-editor: Google-Groups apparently aren’t listservs.  In fact, listservs aren’t listservs.  LISTSERV is a registered trademark, and has been since 1986.  I’m baffled by this little factoid.  It’s on a level with “Happy Birthday” being litigiously copyright-protected.

They’ve decided to label it “Our Tahrir Moment,” because they’re, y’know, not very classy. (Egyptian activists spent years risking their lives in organizing protests that set the groundwork for Tahrir.  Adbusters has written a few blog posts, created an independent website, and pre-announced that if they fail,” it’s MoveOn’s fault!”  The analogy offends my sensibilities, I’ll admit it.)

One new addition is that Anonymous has apparently  decided to participate in this thing.  My official academic stance on Anonymous is “I don’t understand this and it is analytically fascinating.”  So who knows, they could make it interesting.  Anonymous tends to pull off big collective actions that I assume won’t/can’t go anywhere.  Color me curious.

Nonetheless, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that Micah White et al’s more-radical-than-though event will be an utter flop.  They’re claiming 20,000 people will show up and stay there for multiple days.  I really, really doubt it.  And in advance of his public announcement that it’s because of “Clicktivism,” I’d like to once again point out that (1) organizing is hard and (2) there is no evidence that this crowd is any good at organizing.

I plan on stopping by the event tomorrow.  Not to participate, but to watch.  Follow me on Twitter at @davekarpf if you want to read my livetweets (which will likely be quasi-heckling).  And I’ll also post some sort of a writeup or reflection to shoutingloudly next week.

I’ve known Jim for a few years, but never known his full story.  The talk is moving and powerful and thought-provoking.  Click the link above and watch it.

Kudos to Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej for putting together such a solid event.  Talks by Larry Lessig, Eben Moglen, and Dan Sinker (@mayoremanuel) were also clear highlights.  Oh, and Clay Shirky was wearing a 3 Wolf Moon t-shirt.  That’s basically an internet meme wearing an internet meme.  Whoa. Meta.

This is the biggest structural change among online political communities-of-interest since the Scoop blog platform.  Markos has just announced “Yes, I want DailyKos to be blogspot for progressives.”  There will be group blogs within the site.  Group. Blogs.  Within a blog (best “turtles all the way down” joke in the comment section wins a prize).  There will be communities, and reputation-tracking systems, surrounding individual subject areas.

While watching the rollout, a few things to keep in mind:

1. Many community members who will hate the new features initially will come to love them over time.  There is nothing more predictable among online communities than the outcry over new features (new twitter, every new facebook rollout, new google homepages, etc.  We frequent web users are a fickle bunch).  Don’t mistake the initial outcry for the medium-term reaction.

2. This could #fail pretty catastrophically.  Markos seems well aware of this, and I respect the decision to take risks.  But turning DailyKos into a community-of-communities could go terribly awry.  Particularly in a political moment where progressives are frustrated, and neither have a clear opponent to mobilize against nor a realizable policy goal to mobilize in favor of.  This is a weird moment in political time to try something new.  In particular, if there aren’t enough superusers to make the reputation and tagging elements robust, I’d expect the new interface to be in a lot of trouble.

3. It could be the Next Big Thing.  Really.  Scoop was a major change in how blogs get used by political actors.  This could be at least as big.  It will definitely affect the design of my Blogosphere Authority Index 2.0 project.  It may lead to a revisit of the Understanding Blogspace typology as well.

4. Watch for changes in standard participation metrics, and look for new ones.  That’s what I’ll be designing around.  I have a ton of data on total diary posts, comments/diary, etc.  That’s all public, scraped from the site.  Let’s see if comment practices and diary posts expand or contract, 2 or 3 months out.  Let’s see how the top diarists behave, and if new “star” diarists emerge as well.  Let’s see if they form geographically-based tag clouds, and use it to augment meetups.  Let’s see how they incorporate facebook, twitter, and youtube.  Let’s see if other organizations, like Courage Campaign, OFA, PCCC, etc, treat DailyKos as an ecology or as a separate organization (do they work in coalition with DKos, organize through DKos, or a hybrid of both?).

This will probably cause a hiatus in my book-writing for at least a few weeks.  I’ve reached out to two other researchers so far to see if they’re interested in developing a research program around the rollout.  If you’re interested in taking part, please let me know.

Hubs within hubs.

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.

—–

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.

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.

# # #