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…”

This one was remarkable for its sponsors: it was cohosted by CNN and the Tea Party.  Audience questions came from “real tea party activists.”  These, unsurprisingly, were not particularly tough questions.  One, from a clean-cut young man (caucasian, as if you has to wonder), asked “of every dollar I earn, what percentage do you think I should keep?”  Yeah, that’s a real hardball for a slate of candidates who leave Rick Santorum as the moderate in the room!

What are we to make of this partnership?  David Weigel has a nice piece up at Slate, discussing internal tensions between movement activists and the Tea Party Express consultants.  It sounds like being a “meta-brand” has its downsides, at least if you want your movement to do more than provide cover for an existing segment of the party leadership.  Jay Rosen was critical of the whole affair (via Twitter), suggesting that it was a bid by CNN to show how “balanced” they could be.

I actually don’t think it’s that big of a deal, and I don’t think it’s about “balance” on CNN’s part either.

I think CNN’s Tea Party partnership is a Will.I.Am holographic interview.

CNN likes to claim the center among the 24-hour news networks.  Fox has the right, MSNBC has the left (but only kinda), so CNN has the center.  ”The most trusted name in news.”  Rosen is right that this is what they like to tell themselves.

But the thing is, if you view their actions, they aren’t driven by a Quest for the Center.  They’re driven by a Quest for Relevance.  iReporters.  Text-message voting on what their top story should be.  Gigantic touchscreen maps and too-sophisticated data visualizations.   CNN embraces anything that seems novel and special in the hopes that it will drive ratings, catch on, and maybe become the next big thing.  CNN is the network of Shiny Objects.

The #CNNTeaParty debate was a gimmick, little more.  Put it in the same category as the 2008 CNN YouTube Debate.  It isn’t a sign of some major transformation of news or politics.  It isn’t even a sign that CNN is desperately trying to hold the middle of the political spectrum.  CNN is more like the middle child, jumping up and down while screaming “look at meeeeeeeee!”  We have to occasionally look, in case the kid is doing something dangerous.  But what those actions aren’t motivated by is an attempt to appear reasonable.  They’re motivated by a quest for attention.

The sad thing is that CNN used to be one hell of a news organization.  Now it’s an attention-starved eight-year-old, perpetually acting out.  In the process, they’ve puffed up the Tea Party brand a bit more, and further emphasized the disjuncture between Tea-Party-as-Movement and Tea-Party-as-Meme.  But it’ll be replaced by some other shiny object soon enough, I’m sure.  CNN isn’t fighting for the center, they’re fighting for relevance.

Sure, TV news in particular covers hurricanes with too little data, too little understanding of uncertainty and margin of error, and too much footage of reporters trying to stand upright in strong winds. And yes, they have a vested interest in keeping people tuned in (though WNBC, which is mostly what we watched, went largely or totally commercial-free for large chunks of time). And absolutely, the media definitely could have provided more coverage of decidedly-not-NYC areas (North Carolina and Vermont, in particular) where the storm seems to have had much more severe impacts.

But to the critics who are deriding extensive coverage and thoughtful preparation because the storm wasn’t as bad as it might have been: Shut the hell up.

One such cynic is Toby Harnden of the Telegraph (UK)—which I normally like quite a lot—who derides the “Perfect Storm of Hype.” He derides NJ Gov. Christie for his claims that the storm could cause tens of billions in damage and that his evacuation likely saved lives.

The problem with Harnden’s derision? Both claims were quite true at the time and have proven prescient since. Estimates of property losses are already around $7 billion to $13 billion, and several rivers (including some in NJ) are still rising. Despite many pols’ repeated pleas to stay out of the water, the NYPD still had to fish two kayakers out of the river in the middle of the storm. If more people had “just carried on as normal” as Harnden thinks was appropriate, more rescues like that (though perhaps none involving such utter idiocy) and more deaths doubtlessly would have occurred.

Our next cynic is Daily Beast (again, usually a fan) writer Howard Kurtz and his dismissal of the “Hurricane of Hype.” Among other silly things, he says:

The fact that New York, home to the nation’s top news outlets, was directly in the storm’s path clearly fed this story-on-steroids. Does anyone seriously believe the hurricane would have drawn the same level of coverage if it had been bearing down on, say, Ft. Lauderdale?

He blames any extra coverage primarily (not just in small part, which would be defensible) on the media’s self-centeredness? Really? This storm just hit about 75 million people, or one fifth of the nation’s population, the only storm in my lifetime to do so. This is the worst storm to hit NYC, the country’s biggest city by far (almost 9m in NYC proper and almost 19m in the area), since Agnes in 1972.

Anything big that happens to New York City is a big deal just because it’s New York City. (Any other sports fans sick of hearing about ‘Melo?) When Denver (my home town) shuts down because of weather, that’s local news. When NYC does the same thing, that’s world news.

If this storm had hit the Miami/Ft. Lauderdale area, yes, that would have impacted a few million people. But the NYC area alone has more people than all of Florida, and we are not built to face hurricanes. Sorry, that’s a pretty good, objective set of reasons to give more media attention to a hurricane hitting New York than one hitting Ft. Lauderdale.

Finally, no mindless spout of media blather would be complete without an idiotic bunch of partisan attacks on politicians in general and Obama in particular for sensible preparation for and warnings about a natural disaster.

While they might also be coming from the left at NJ’s Republican Governor Christie, I have yet to see one, while the right-wing hate machine has continued pounding Obama and other Dems with their hurricane-force hot air. People are dead, lives are ruined, and these blowhards are cynically deriding our leaders for trying too hard. Party should play no part in supporting calls for disaster preparedness. I for one thought NJ’s Republican Governor Chris Christie did very well; if there’s one politician you’d appoint to get in front of the microphone and tell people to “get the hell off the beach,” it’s him.

Irene was a major storm that came through the heart of the country’s most-populated area. Could the TV news coverage of Irene have been more thoughtful, useful, accurate, and data-driven? Yes. Erase “Irene” and put ANYTHING there and the answer is yes. (Uh, “crime” anyone?) That’s how TV news works. Off the record, even people who work in TV news will agree. But it actually was a big deal and was covered accordingly. If you want to use Irene coverage as an object lesson in how to do better TV news, fine, but that’s not the criticism I’m seeing.

And for those assaulting politicians for their abundance of caution and attempts to lead the country through a genuine national disaster? Go jump in a lake. I’d recommend Lake Pontchartrain.

Jeff Jarvis had some fun on twitter this weekend.  After a day spent reading news about the debt limit, and a nice  pinot noir with dinner, he tweeted, ”Hey, Washington assholes, it’s our country, our economy, our money. Stop fucking with it.”  Encouraged by some of his replies and retweets, he turned it into a hashtag, #fuckyouwashington.  It didn’t *technically* reach the trending topics list — twitter management censors for language a bit — but it did pick up steam, with 10,000 or so people writing their own #fuckyouwashington message.

So far, so good.  I scanned the tweets while standing in line at Trader Joe’s Saturday night.  It was pretty entertaining.  The debt ceiling negotiations are patently absurd.  A routine congressional vote has been converted into a mighty standoff that might bring down the global economy, all because Republican legislators are more beholden to the most conservative elements of their base than they are to managing the damn country.  Sure, blow off some steam on twitter.  Riff on the theme a bit.

But, predictably, the next day Jarvis and others took to calling their little exercise a “movement.”  That’s where I board the cranky-train. [important context: I've been in nonstop editing mode on my book manuscript.   My snark-meter could probably use recalibration.]

If we label everything a social movement, then the term ceases to have any meaning.

The size of this “movement” bears some scrutiny.  In a country of 300,000,000+, only a few million pay regular attention to politics.  Let’s say (for some back-of-the-envelope math) that the politically-attentive class is approximately the same size as the audience of Bill O’Reilly, Rachel Maddow, and other political talk shows.  That would be around 10 million, or ~3% of the population.  Not very big.  Many of those people are on twitter, of course.    Let’s pretend they all are.  And they’re mostly going to be linked to people with similar interests — other members of the politically-attentive class.

On Saturday, a member of the techno-journalistic elite with a strong following, offers up an engaging hashtag, linked to the news that has politically-attentive Americans concerned.  About 10,000 use the hashtag, echoing his concern.  That’s 0.1% of the politically-engaged class, and 0.003% of the national population. We’re supposed to call this big?

Importantly, their tweets don’t aggregate to much of anything.  It’s over by Sunday.  The “movement” received coverage on CBSOnline’s “What’s trending,” a blog devoted to… trending topics on twitter.  That same blog has a story up right now about George Takei and planking.  Which is also pretty entertaining.  And also isn’t a social movement.  Dave Weigel also mentioned it in a blog post for Slate, but he was writing about the debt ceiling anyway.  I’m all for giving Weigel entertaining hooks, but how about some #realtalk while we’re at it?

Jarvis sees “cause for hope” in all of this.  He writes that it demonstrates “the potential of a public armed with a Gutenberg press in every pocket, with its tools of publicness.”

Meh.

What Jeff Jarvis did Saturday night was a meme.  It rippled and went viral a bit.  It was kinda cool.  But not every meme is a social movement.

Social movements are about building and exercising power.  The end goal is to force powerful individuals to take some action that they wouldn’t take otherwise.  Or the end goal is to replace recalcitrant individuals in power with people who are more in touch with the will of the people.  In the process, social movements affect the balance of power, give people a sense of their own power, and result in concrete improvements in people’s lives.  Social movements knit communities together and reinvigorate democracies.  They inspire people to enter public life.  They ain’t easy.

Since social movements are so attractive, and since its pretty much impossible to distinguish the early stages of a social movement from the early stages of an ephemeral and passing fad, there’s a strong tendency to label everything a social movement.  And that degrades their meaning.  (It’s like grade inflation.  If everyone gets an A, then an A isn’t anything special.  The difference is that it’s difficult to care much about grade inflation.  Social movements can actually, y’know, change the world.)  We should fight against that trend.

So I’m thankful to Jeff Jarvis for the meme this past Saturday.  It was entertaining, and fun to read.  It’s nice to hear that there are thousands of people out in twitterland who also find the debt ceiling negotiations absurd.

But don’t call it a movement.  Please.  There isn’t a second or third act to this particular play.  It was a meme, it went briefly viral among people who already care about this sort of thing, and it left few traces behind.  The debt ceiling fight continued, oblivious to the twittering masses.  Social movements are something greater than that.  They’re extended, and collective, and costly, and sadly still far too rare.  If social media tools are influencing social movements (Hint: they are.), we’ll need to be clearer in our language before we can make much headway in figuring out how.

Cranky session over.  Back to my edits.

I had one big “ah hah” moment in the course of reading the book.  “Multidimensionality can be outstripped by improved point prediction.  And that would be a bad thing.”  Allow me to riff on that a bit below:

“Multidimensionality” is a shorthand that I often use when teaching Sunstein’s work.  In Republic.com, Sunstein introduces the concept of the “Daily Me.”  First envisioned by MIT Media Lab’s Nicholas Negroponte, the Daily Me was a personalized web portal, in which each individual received news and information customized to their interests.  Sunstein raised concern about the Daily Me, suggesting that it could produce “cyberbalkanization,” in which competing ideological communities only receive news that reinforce their own points of view, leading in turn to further radicalization.  American democracy has never been calm and deliberative, but we at least have historically been divided through divergent interpretations of the same events.  In the world of the Daily Me, we don’t even interpret the same events – our news becomes hypercustomized instead.

The Daily Me is a provocative concept.  It’s also clearly limited in two respects.  First, the concept is anchored in a time period when personalized web portals (Yahoo or MSN landing pages) were viewed as the future of the internet.  The developmental path of the internet veered off in a different direction.  Web 2.0 took off, and we increasingly spent our time at sites that feature user-generated content and community activity.  When I log on to the web, I check gmail, 3 blogs, and facebook.  Corporations are behind each of these spaces, to be sure, but they’re different corporations than in 2001, and they’re inviting me to engage in different activities than Yahoo and MSN were.  Rather than a hypertargeted news feed, there’s the socially-derived postings on my facebook wall.  So, for that reason, the Daily Me is a bit dated.  Sunstein himself noted this in Republic.com 2.0, where he suggested we’ve developed elements of a “Daily Us” instead.

The Daily Us can still provide reinforcing views and divergent news agendas though.  Take a minute to scan the blog posts at DailyKos and HotAir, the top political blogs on the left and right.  Depending on the day, you’re likely to find that they aren’t just using different frames to discuss the days news, but instead are talking about different news topics altogether.  Members of these communities, then, are still at risk of cyberbalkanization.

“Multidimensionality” mitigates the cyberbalkanization problem.  Simply put, members of a political online communities have non-political interests as well.  I may only interact with liberals on DailyKos, but I have several libertarian friends through Yehoodi and there are a few Republicans who are active Washington Wizards fans as well.  As a member of several communities-of-interest, I’m exposed to people with cross-cutting views on politics, broadly defined.  Our personalities, interests, and affiliations cannot be reduced to a simple one dimensional (left-right) spectrum, because we also build social capital through a variety of hobbyist communities.  The answer to online communities is …more online communities (cue the recitations of Federalist 10).

For those reasons, I’ve long been convinced that we don’t need to be all that concerned about cyberbalkanization.

And then I read Eli’s book.

The core of Pariser’s concern is well explained in his TED Talk.  Eli is a progressive.  He also has other hobbies and interests.  Thus, he consciously has developed conservative friends, and is tied to them through facebook.  One day however, he noticed that he was no longer seeing their updates in his news feed.  Facebook’s algorithm had recorded that he didn’t click on those links very often.  So it “optimized” his experience by removing those updates.

On the surface, that’s a small issue.  A progressive doesn’t see headlines that weren’t all that appealing to begin with.  But it points to a much bigger problem.  Even at the social layer of the web, multidimensionality is viewed as a type of inefficiency – an engineering problem to be solved.  For the engineers and the third-party advertisers, the goal is better point prediction.  Through improvements in automated filtering, they can reduce the incidental knowledge gains that come through membership in multiple communities.  Facebook, ideally, would like to only show me sports-related updates from my Wizards fan-friends, and only show me politics-related updates from my netroots friends.  Advertisers, ideally, would like to know which elements of those subcommunities most fit my profile.  It’s an engineering problem to them, with an engineering solution.

Of particular concern is that this personalization is going on without our knowledge.  Even if I don’t want it to happen – even if I’d like to hear the contrarian opinions of blues dancing Ron Paul fans – large social media hubs are going to treat those voices as noise and try to remove it.  Unless I decide to put outstanding effort into “fooling the filters,” I’m going to be stuck solely with reinforcing views.  And that increases the threat of cyberbalkanization.

I’m tempted to call this another example of the “beneficial inefficiencies” problem.  Multidimensionality may appear as an engineering problem for social media purveyors and the third-party advertisers who pay them.  But it also serves to mitigate some social problems.  As the social web continues to develop, cyberbalkanization could easily reemerge as a substantial threat.  In short, multidimensionality can be trumped by improved point prediction.  And that would be a bad thing.

It isn’t easy to conduct academic research on this sort of “point prediction.”  The engineers and data industries operate under copyright protection, proprietary data, nondisclosure agreements, and trade secret rules.  This is non-transparent data, and there are strong incentives for the companies and engineers to keep it that way.  Pariser’s interviews with Yahoo and Google engineers, as well as his conversations with dozens of social scientists, represent a substantial step forward in understanding the current digital environment.

—

I’m impressed with Pariser’s book.  It’s well worth reading, and explains these concepts with greater clarity and better examples that I’m providing above.  It’s a nice departure from the normal “cyberskeptic” book (Jaron Lanier and Nicholas Carr providing two recent examples).  It’s well-balanced, thoughtful, and serious.  In a rapidly changing medium, it helps highlight what the Internet has become, where it may be heading, and why that matters.  Pariser asks us not to fear, criticize, or dislike the digital landscape, but to help make it better.  As he notes in his conclusion, “the Internet isn’t doomed, for a simple reason: This new medium is nothing if not plastic.”

Indeed.

There’s a post I meant to write after the Shirley Sherrod incident this summer.  Instead it became a lecture that I give to my students in my Media, Government, and Politics seminar at Rutgers.  Given ABC’s announcement last night that he’ll be involved in their election night coverage and analysis, I think it’s time I share the perspective.

—

We are governed by laws and by norms.  There’s an important difference.  Laws are written down.  You break the law, you face a lawsuit.  Particularly in 21st century litigious America, the power of law can be used equally as sword and as shield (cough, cough, copyright).

Some things can’t (or shouldn’t) be legislated.  Freedom of the press, for instance, is a First Amendment guarantee against government regulation of the press.  We have journalist shield laws, for instance.  There are exceptions — libel and slander, fighting words — but in general we have a strong and well-intentioned tradition of giving the “fourth branch” the freedom to keep the other three branches of government accountable.

Norms are informal agreements.  You break a norm, you face shunning from the community that holds that norm.  ”You’ll never work in this town again,” that sort of thing.   For decades, the internal norms of the journalistic profession have been an effective ward against certain types of behavior.  If you falsify a story or plagiarize, you’re done in the profession.  Fired and unhireable.  What’s more, these norms are enforced in a public manner, creating a set of cautionary tales.  Journalists are taught about Janet Cook and “Jimmy’s World,” for instance.

The tools of digital media — the ones that allow me to write this blog, post video to youtube, and post photos to flickr — allow for a beautiful mashup culture, but also a dangerous collapse of context.  Selective editing allows any amoral jerk with Final Cut Pro to create a fake news story out of whole cloth.

Our laws aren’t going to be very useful in stopping such activity, because law is both sword and shield.  The boundaries between journalist and citizen are necessarily fuzzy, and mashups ARE political speech, and should be protected as such.  But that leaves norms to do the heavy lifting of mitigating against false scandal-mongering.

And that brings us to Andrew Breitbart and his protege, James O’Keefe (himself a Rutgers alum).  O’Keefe’s ACORN tape was a perfect example of the collapse of context.  Use a hidden video camera, collect hours of footage of people reacting to awkward questions, then splice the best bits together and announce “scandal.”  It worked, and there was no public reckoning when the truth of the matter came out.  The norms against falsifying stories simply did not operate.  O’Keefe became a star.

Breitbart attempted the same gambit this summer with the Shirley Sherrod video.  Take a half-minute clip out of a 40 minute speech, trumpet that you’ve found a racist in the Obama administration, and let the pageviews just flow in.  The Obama administration overreacted, firing Sherrod before the truth could be known, but that was in response to a perceived reality — that this was going to be *the* story in the news cycle, regardless of how flimsy the evidence.  Breitbart’s gambit didn’t work very well because it was too easy to find out just how selectively the story had been edited.  He did a hack job of his hackery, and so *that* became the story.  Even Bill O’Reilly condemned the actions on Fox News.

At that point, the question really became “how will the journalistic community react?”  At issue is whether any norm of professional accountability is still at work, or whether it’s all just controversy and pageviews.  Breitbart is a public figure and the Sherrod incident was a high-profile event.  Our laws aren’t supposed to govern this one (Breitbart has found enough of a gray area, noting that he just promoted the tapes, but didn’t edit them himself); our norms are.  So if the journalistic community reacts by making him a pariah, then that sends a strong signal about the boundaries of acceptable behavior.  Falsifying a story may make you famous, but there can be serious costs.  If, on the other hand, a few months later Breitbart is back in the news with no mention of his track record, then that also sends a strong signal.  It says that celebrity, controversy, and page views trump everything else.  Getting caught in an elaborate lie only increases your name recognition, and the industry rewards fame more than anything else.

There are conflicting reports about what Breitbart’s role on ABC News will be this Tuesday night.  ABC says it will be “exceedingly minor.”  Breitbart’s own site, bigjournalism.com, says he’ll be “bringing live analysis from Arizona.”  Mediaite says that his inclusion will make it “must-see tv” on Tuesday night.

On Monday, I’ll be updating my students on this.  I won’t be watching this “must-see tv.”  I’ll watch another station.  But what I’m going to tell my students is that ABC is making it clear that, as far as they’re concerned, you should skip the “Media Ethics” class and take “Video Editing” instead.  The only defense we have against the malicious exploitation of the collapse of context is a set of community norms that mitigate against the worst excesses presented by digital communications technology.  Those norms have to be stronger than the drive for a few more pageviews, otherwise the mainstream press becomes identical to the tabloid press.  And those norms are most important in response to high-profile events where the community signals that an activity is out-of-bounds.

ABC, to paraphrase a much younger version of Jon Stewart, “you are hurting America. Please stop hurting America.”

…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.

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.

In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins’s excellent work on the various effects of digital media on media production/culture, “convergence” takes on multiple meanings.  Part of what makes it such a good book is that all of these meanings are true.  Media convergence includes both the rise of mass media conglomerates and the rise of read/write culture.  It is the interaction of those forces that determines the shape of media power in the 21st century — we can’t just focus on one or the other.

That said, there’s also the normative question of “is it a good thing or a bad thing?”  Social scientists are trained to duck this question, but we all have our opinions.  And particularly for those of us who deal with YouTube and other “user-generated content,” it’s easy to get swallowed up by the junk and the horrendous comment threads and bemoan the lack of quality that comes as we move from a filter-then-publish world to a publish-then-filter one.

And then there’s the “JK Wedding Dance.”

You’ve almost certainly seen it.  It’s been viewed over 33 million times, making it the third most-visited YouTube clip of 2009.  Cute couple.  Wedding in a chapel.  Chris Brown’s “Forever” starts playing.  The groomsmen and bridesmaids start dancing down the aisle, followed by the rest of the wedding party and ending with the bride and groom.  It’s engendered numerous spoofs, and was directly referenced in The Office’s wedding episode.  It’s hard not to smile, watching this outpouring of joy and affection.  These people were having fun.

I can’t help but compare the JK Wedding Dance to “The Real Wedding Crashers.”  This was a short-lived reality show on NBC in 2007.  It’s pretty much the perfect antithesis to the wedding dance.  Launched after the Vince Vaughn/Owen Wilson pic, “Wedding Crashers,” the premise of the show was that soon-to-be-married couples would secretly sign up to have their nuptial events ruined by the “crashers.”  Hidden cameras would capture the crowd’s disgusted reactions, and we the people could watch and entertainment.  After months of constant/heavy promotion, the show lasted 4 episodes before joining the rotting husks of so many of its fellow bad-idea reality shows.

“Real Wedding Crashers” always left a bad taste in my mouth.  You can just imagine the pitch meeting: “it’s just like the movie hit, but with real people!  Imagine a cross between Survivor and Wedding Crashers…  It’ll cost nothing to promote and be a cross-platform event!”  This is 15-minutes-of-fame at its worst, taking one of the most storied moments in a relationship and turning it into a mean prank on friends and family.  It’s crass, it’s mean, and it appeals to the worst in each of us.  Oh, and it’s over-promoted on primetime television, probably replacing a cult favorite broadcast television show that had high production costs and a niche, devoted fan base.  It’s hard to think about “reality” shows like this (which are, in actuality, the antithesis of “real”) and not wish a speedy collapse upon the media conglomerates who visit them upon us.

And then there’s the JK Wedding Dance.  Semi-spontaneous, joyful, fun, making a special event more special and more memorable for the community that’s present.  Zero production costs, zero promotion, and reaching a viral audience of 33 million.

I don’t want to make too much of the juxtaposition — just share it because it so often occurs to me.  These are only two cases, interesting because of their symmetry.  But when I consider the normative question of whether the paired rise of participatory media and destruction of revenue streams that supported cherished older media, I cannot help but reflect on this pair of examples.  Most of YouTube is a combination of junk user-generated content and clippings from the mainstream media.  There are very few gems like this one, and bountiful examples of the fundamental flaws in the human character, I’m sure.  But the same is true for network television.  Given the choice, I find YouTube and other social media far less depressing than the economic logic of mainstream media convergence.  Democratizing production allows for more beautiful ideas to see the light of day.  As a researcher, I’m not sure how to count, prove, or disprove any of that.  But as a citizen, it sure does bring a smile to my face.