shouting loudly

So… this happened yesterday.  It’s too early to pronounce SOPA firmly dead, but clearly the blackout proved to be an epic tactical win. The blackout worked on three levels.  First we have the immediate stated goal: educate site visitors about SOPA/PIPA and encourage them to contact their Member of Congress.  This is basically a souped-up [...]

Here’s a letter I’ve just sent to my city councilmember, Stephen Levin, and Mayor Bloomberg: Dear Councilmember Levin, I am a voter in your district and I am writing to express my deep and utter outrage at the NYPD’s documented mistreatment of peaceful protesters. This is already a long-established and shameful part of NYPD’s legacy, [...]

Eli Pariser, the former Executive Director of MoveOn, has a new book out on the social impacts of the internet.  It’s quite good – reminiscent of Cass Sunstein’s Republic.com and Infotopia, in that it is utterly readable, carefully constructed, and critical in tenor.  The important difference between Pariser’s book and Sunstein’s books is temporal in [...]

Note: I’ll be spending the next few months writing a book about the new generation of internet-mediated political groups.  This post will be my first “book blog,” in which I try out new ideas that I’m planning to include in the manuscript.  Book blog pieces will be less tied to the politics-of-the-day, and will be [...]

So the election is over.  It went about how Nate Silver and the other poll analysts expected.  The hope amongst many on the left (also covered by Silver) was that some combination of the cell phone effect and the OFA turnout machine would rescue the House and crucial Senators. The specter of the cell phone [...]

[Update: read Jay Rosen's account and analysis of how this all turned out.  I agree entirely.] 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 [...]

Julian Zelizer has a post up on CNN.com, echoing Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece from last week and making pretty much exactly the same mistakes.  He argues that “facebook politics” foster weak ties, rather than strong ties, and that these don’t work to sustain social movements in the long term.  I’ve met Julian in the [...]

Micah White, from Adbusters, has an article up with The Guardian Online, in which he attacks MoveOn.org for “clicktivism” and trots out every half-baked critique of digital activism I’ve ever seen. It’s appallingly bad. White relies on several glorified fictions of what activism used to be like. ( y’know, back in the good old days [...]

Paul Dawson, one of my favorite political science professors at Oberlin, used to talk a lot about “sacred cows” in the context of politics.  “You’ve got to be careful when you stumble upon someone’s sacred cow issue.  You’ll know that it’s a sacred cow when they start to gore you.” Nate Silver, it seems, has [...]

You’ve probably seen or heard something about Carly Fiorina’s “demonsheep” commercial.  Here it is, in case you haven’t: The payoff from this 3:21 second campaign “commercial” comes at the end, when a person in a homemade sheep outfit with laser-demon-eyes appears behind a tree, supposedly indicating a wolf in sheep’s clothing.  It’s hilariously amateurish, and [...]