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 version of the standard action alerts that MoveOn, Demand Progress, Organizing for America and other advocacy groups send daily to their members.  I haven’t seen any numbers, but I’ll bet that the Congressional phone lines were lighting up yesterday. Update: see Bowers at DailyKos for the numbers.  They’re HUGE!

That said, heavy phone and e-mail traffic is nothing new for Congressional offices.  The side that generates heavier constituent outrage doesn’t always win.  Constituent outrage is one signal that Congress considers.  They also consider expert testimony (firmly opposed to the bill) and the will of wealthy donors/affected industries (often expressed through lobbyists – an excess of Hollywood money and lobbying influence is what got us the awful legislation in the first place).

It worked on a second level though: as news.  Wikipedia going dark drew wide coverage.  Even if you didn’t happen to visit Wikipedia yesterday, if you visited a news site or tuned in to Colbert, you found out it was happening.  This forces politicians who were ignoring the issue to take a stand.  Reporters don’t call and ask for positions on every issue, every day.  Yesterday, they were calling about this one.  And news coverage also serves as an approximation of public opinion for members of congress [h/t Susan Herbst].

Notice, however, that the blackout was news specific because it was original.  This has never happened before*.  Wikipedia doesn’t take political stances.  Google doesn’t call on web-searchers to contact congress.  The freshness of the tactic is what makes it newsworthy.  If Wikipedia did this once a month, it would quickly cease to be newsworthy.  This is the “advocacy inflation” problem that I’ve written about before [h/t Daniel Mintz, who suggested the term].

There’s a third channel of influence at work here as well: direct exposure.  Congressional offices are busy places.  In the course of the day yesterday, at least one staffer in every office probably Googled something or looked something up on Wikipedia.  Many Members of Congress did so themselves as well.  The blackout cut through the din of constituent calls and emails, lobby visits, and policy briefings.  They saw it themselves, and it grabbed attention in a way that everyday persuasion and influence tactics never can.

Notice that this third channel works because of the sites involved.  I thought it was great that DailyKos and BoingBoing took part in the action, but if it was just those sites the tactic would have been much weaker.  Those sites draw tech-savvy and politics-savvy audiences.  Even with the support of conservative sites like RedState, the average American is unlikely to see the content, and the only Congressional staffers who will see it are the ones charged with monitoring the blogs.

Overall, we should feel good about this one.  It was a remarkable tactic, and demonstrates that the big companies in the digital environment are beginning to recognize that they have to push back against the big companies from the traditional entertainment environment.  That’s no revolution – Google is still a corporation, after all  – but it provides a bit more pluralistic balance in a policy arena that has been where the MPAA has gone unchallenged and unchecked for far too long.

*There was a sort-of precursor in the 1990s, when early “netizens” protested a managerial decision at geocities by turning their geocities pages dark.

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, but I am writing in particular to address incidents surrounding the protests during the past week.

The first and most egregious appeared on the Times’ City Room blog, at:

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/video-appears-to-show-protesters-being-pepper-sprayed/

I assume this is already on your radar and that, in light of it, you were already intending on demanding an investigation, including the public naming and criminal prosecution of the officer who pepper-sprayed these already-detained women in the face. If this officer is not indicted and tried for this action, I will not be alone in deciding that the NYPD is officially above the law.

As a professor of media studies, I am also particularly disturbed by the apparent willingness of police to treat journalists as protesters and to harass and even arrest them. See photographs showing as much here:

http://davidscameracraft.blogspot.com/2011/09/occupy-wall-street-march-violence.html

In at least two of the photos, the photographer identifies people who were arrested for reporting on the protests—including one who is a reporter for PBS.

We live in a country where the First Amendment right to freedom of speech, of the press, and to assemble peaceably are supposed to be inviolable. These actions leave me deeply concerned that the city is willing to allow (or even, dare I suggest as much, encourage–at least in some quarters) the NYPD to trample on these sacred constitutional rights. No protest of any size could do as much to bring shame upon this city as the NYPD have done in the last week.

If the Constitution means anything to you, sir, I urge you to demand a systemic investigation and, where appropriate, criminal prosecutions–especially when an officer will sadistically injure helpless citizens.

Sincerely,
Bill D. Herman
Assistant Professor
Department of Film & Media Studies
Hunter College, City University of New York

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.

I’ve written once before on this blog about Moore’s Law, the surprisingly accurate 1965 prediction that computing capacity would double every 18-to-24 months.  What I’ve noticed recently is that, while Moore’s Law is common knowledge within the tech community (you see it mentioned in almost every issue of Wired magazine). it’s much less well-understood in the political and social science communities.  Those crowds are aware, of course, that their computer from 4 years ago now seems ancient, slow, and lacking in storage space, but it appears to me that the deep political implications of Moore’s Law (which I’ll be calling “Moore’s Law Effects” in the book, unless someone wants to earn their way into the acknowledgments by suggesting a catchier name!) have largely gone overlooked.

I checked through the indexes of several major internet-and-politics books and, sure enough, there’s no mention of Moore’s Law.  Bruce Bimber’s Information and American Democracy, Matt Hindman’s Myth of Digital Democracy, Bimber and Davis’s Campaigning Online, Phil Howard’s New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen.  I’ll check a few others on Monday when I’m in the office, but I’m pretty sure there’s no mention of it in Kerbel’s Netroots, Davis’s Typing Politics, Chadwick’s Internet Politics or either of Cass Sunstein’s books either.  …These are good books I’m talking about here — award-winners that rightly deserve the praise they’ve received.  I’d be thrilled if my book ends up half as good as many of them.  Yet Moore’s Law doesn’t earn a single mention, nor does it show up in most of the influential articles in the field.  It just hasn’t entered the discourse.

The one exception I’ve found is a Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy working paper by Zysman and Newman that eventually became the lead article of a co-edited volume, How Revolutionary is the Revolution.  It’s a political economy treatment of the digital era as a whole and seems pretty promising (amazon should have it to me by mid-week).  I really enjoyed the following quote in the working paper: ”…Information technology represents not one, but a sequence of revolutions.  It is a continued and enduring unfolding of digital innovation, sustaining a long process of industrial adaptation and transition” (pg 8).  That “sequence of revolutions” line is what I think we’ve largely been missing when talking about digital politics.

Take Bimber and Davis’s Campaigning Online for instance.  They conducted first-rate research in the 2000 election cycle on citizen access to campaign websites.  The central finding was that, by and large, the only citizens who visit such sites are existing partisans.  The sites are useful for message reinforcement, rather than message persuasion.  As a result, Bimber and Davis conclude that the impact of the internet on political campaigns is pretty slight.  Web sites simply don’t reach undecided voters, so they aren’t of much use in determining election results.

Their book was released in September, 2003.  By that time, the Dean campaign had already attracted overwhelming media attention, leading observers everywhere to rethink the importance of mobilization.  It was an unlucky sequence of events, having a definitive work on the internet and American political campaigns come out just as the Dean campaign was overthrowing everything we thought we knew about the internet and American political campaigns.

Here’s the thing, though: Bimber and Davis weren’t wrong. The Internet of 2000 wasn’t particularly useful for mobilization.  John McCain raised a bit of online money around his primary, but online bill paying was still in its untrustworthy infancy, and the social web was still restricted to the lead adopter crowd who had heard of Pyra Labs.  The suite of technologies making up the Internet changed between 2000 and 2003.  It changed again between 2003/04 and 2006.  [Pop quiz: what was John Kerry's YouTube strategy in the '04 election?  (A: YouTube didn't exist until 2005.)]  And it continues to do so.  The internet of 2010 is actually a different medium than the internet of 2000.  The devices we use to access it have changed.  Cheap processing power and increasing bandwidth speeds let us access video and geolocational aspects that were prohibitively expensive and technically infeasible or impossible in 2000.  We’ve traveled through five iterations of Moore’s Law, and that means that the devices and architecture of the earlier internet have been overwritten (html to xml being just the tip of the iceberg).

The internet is a sequence of communications revolutions, and that is entirely because of Moore’s Law.  It makes the internet different than previous revolutions in information technology.  Consider: as the television or radio moved from 10% household penetration to 80% household penetration, how much did the technology itself change?  I’d argue it wasn’t much at all.  A television set from 1930 is fundamentally pretty similar to a television set from 1960.  The major changes of the 20th century can be counted on one hand – color television, remote control, vcr, maybe a couple others.  It is frequently noted that the internet’s penetration rate has been faster than these previous communications technologies.  But what rarely gets mentioned is that the internet itself has changed pretty dramatically in the process. (Need further convincing?  Watch the 1995 movie Hackers and listen for the reference to one character’s blazing-fast 28.8 kb modem.  LolCats and YouTube aren’t so fun at 28.8kbs speed.  Or read James Gleick’s 1995 New York Times Magazine essay “This is Sex?” in which he explains that the internet is a terrible place for pornography because search is so complicated and the pictures upload so slowly!)

Transitioning into the political sphere, it bears noting that every election since 1996 has been labeled “the internet election” or “the year of the internet” by a set of researchers and public intellectuals.  The paradox, of sorts, is that they have been right every time.  2012 will be different than 2010, 2008, 2006 2004, 2002, and 2000.  It will be a different medium, in which users engage in modified activities, and this will create new opportunities for campaigns and organizations to engage in acts of mobilization and persuasion.  The cutting-edge techniques of last year become mundane, encouraging organizations to maintain a culture of ostentatious innovation.

Now I’m not suggesting that the internet exists in some state of quantum uncertainty, where we can predict basically nothing in the future based on the past or present.  In fact, as Rasmus Kleis Nielsen points out, the tools that will have the biggest impact on campaign organizations will be the ones that have become mundane, reaching near-universal penetration rates and no longer subject to a steep learning curve.  (As we recently learned with Google Wave, e-mail is much a settled routine at this point.)  Indeed, one of the lessons here may be that we are on much safer grounds when studying individual internet-mediated tools that have reached near-universal adoption (within a given community).  The techno-centric studies of facebook, youtube, and twitter that are a recent fad of sorts are on much weaker ground, because those tools are themselves still pretty dramatically changing thanks to increasing adoption and the ongoing influence of Moore’s Law.

The other thing it tells us, however, is that we should focus attention on the new organizations and institutions being built out of the digital economy.  The continual waves of innovation made possible by Moore’s Law mean that existing industries do not solely need to adapt to a single change in communications media.  Rather, an existing market leader who hires the best consultants, purchases a fleet of state-of-the-art hardware and software, and spends two years developing their plan for the digital environment will suddenly find that the internet has changed in a few important ways, their hardware and software is outdated, and the plan those consultants developed has collected more dust than accolades.

Communications revolutions (or changes in “information regime,” if you prefer to avoid talk of revolution) create a classically disruptive moment for various sectors of the economy.  Rather than advantaging existing market leaders, whose R&D departments let them lead the way in sustaining innovations, disruptive moments tend to lead to the formation of new markets that undercut the old ones (this is classic Christensen).  Startups do better under those conditions, because they have low operating costs and no ingrained organizational routines.  And while individual areas of the internet eventually give way to  monopolies (particularly if we lose net neutrality and let major firms capture markets and tamp down on competition),  those monopolies aren’t as secure as they were in previous eras.  Just ask AOL, Compuserv, Microsoft or Yahoo. The wrong policy decisions can still basically kill the internet, but Moore’s Law creates a scenario in which ongoing disruptions continually advantage new entrants, experimenting with new things.

That, frankly, is why my focus has been on the rise of these internet-mediated advocacy groups.  It’s because they represent a disruption of the advocacy group system.  They embrace ostentatious innovation, keep their staffing and overhead small, and otherwise continue to act like a start-up (and are often founded by technologists with a background in startup culture).  They fiddle with membership and fundraising regimes, and develop new tactical repertoires unlike anything found among the older advocacy groups.  And Moore’s Law suggests that the internet is still in a state of becoming, that the emergence of these new institutions is much more substantial than the mass behavioral patterns found among citizens in the internet of 2010, which may very well be altered as Moore’s Law allows the internet to become something else in 2012.

Moore’s Law, disruption theory, and new developments at the organizational level.  That’s what I think has been missing from our understanding of the internet and American politics thus far.

What do you think?

The specter of the cell phone effect is raised every election cycle.  Most pollsters do not include cell phones — doing so is troublesome and expensive.  Many Americans have given up landlines.  That means that landline random-digit dialing is not a truly random sample of the electorate.  If cell phone users have an ideological skew (and Pew tells us they do), then you’ll end up underestimating some segment of the population.  The polls might be wrong.  There is hope.

This came up in ’06, ’08, and ’10.  Each time, it has proven spurious.  The pollsters have been pretty damn accurate, at the end of the day.

I’m here to tell you that we’ll hear these same arguments in 2012 and, more importantly, we should take them seriously.

At some point, enough of the country will have switched to cell phones that landline random-digit dialing becomes deeply flawed.  We are living through a diffusion process (well, several diffusion processes actually).  Under such circumstances, it’s important to keep an eye out for change.  Usually, if x = true at time A and x = true at time B, time C, time D, etc, you can safely infer that x = true at the next point.  But when you’re living through a diffusion process that can reasonably be expected to change x [in this case, x being defined as "landline respondents making up enough of the populace to construct a random sample with the help of some fancy weighting schemes on the backend"], you have to keep watching.  We know that at some point, landline polling will become basically spurious.  We don’t know when that point will arrive.  Talking about the cell phone effect isn’t a “cry wolf” scenario.

So goodbye, cell phone effect.  I wish you’d played a bigger role in this years elections.  I’ll see you in two years, when many will dismiss you out of hand, and I’ll stamp me feet and explain why they’re fundamentally wrong to do so.

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.”

There are three basic issues with the argument he presents — issues that are starting to percolate among public intellectuals, so it’s worth refuting them here and now:

1. Equating digital activism (“facebook politics”) with “weak ties.”

Zelizer writes, “What makes Facebook politics vulnerable is that it lacks the local element that has always been so crucial to politics.”  He also invokes Gladwell’s example of the Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-ins during the civil rights movement.  Much has already been written about the flaws in Gladwell’s argument.  The unifying theme is that, by suggesting “previous social movements = strong ties/digital activism = weak ties,” Gladwell is constructing an absurd straw man.  If we compare the Woolworth’s boycott to clicking “like” on facebook, then of course digital activism will seem diluted.  But this is the wrong comparison.

During the civil rights movement, there were plenty of citizens who were only weakly tied to the protest actions.  One such population were northern whites, who mostly engaged in the passive act of watching protests on television, and occassionally then wrote letters to the President.  Taeku Lee uses these letters in his book, Mobilizing Public Opinion as a measure of activated public opinion.  Facebook engagement is better understood as a 21st century equivalent of these activities — we used to hear about social movements on television and occassionally write a letter or send a check to an organization.  Now we hear about it on TV, or Twitter, or Blogs, or YouTube, or our FaceBook newsfeeds, and we occassionally click “like,” or forward it to our social networks, or blog about it, or write an e-mail to the President, or give money.  The venues for active public opinion have multiplied.

If we treat this “slacktivism” as a modification of “armchair activism,” then suddenly we’re considering a difference-in-degree rather than a difference-in-kind.

Meanwhile, not all internet-mediated politics occurs through weak ties and “likes” on facebook.  This weekend (on 10/10/10), 350.org is organizing an international day of climate action with over 5,000 events planned worldwide.  The 10/10/10 climate actions have served as a major rallying point for the climate movement — a movement that constantly relies on digital technology to make location-based organizing easier and more effective.  The notion that online activism is divorced from “the local element” was perhaps true in 1999 or 2002, but for years now the biggest advances among social movement organizations have been made by groups that blend online and offline.

2. Equating the Obama campaign with “facebook politics.”

I lived in Charlottesville, VA during the 2008 election.  Obama for America had seven campaign offices in that college town, including a main office in the center of the downtown mall.  It was the largest campaign field mobilization in at least a generation, and that was comprised primarily of old fashioned door-knocking and phone-calling.  When Zelizer writes “Obama’s team may still have all the cell numbers that they collected before announcing their vice presidential pick, but few people are answering or texting,” he’s making a common mistake about the movement feel of the Obama campaign and social movements in general.

Social movements tend to recede in participation after they achieve some major policy goal. Passing the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act doesn’t end racism, but it nonetheless leads to smaller rallies.  Likewise, political campaigns (movement-like or non) recede in participation after election day.  When Obama for America became Organizing for America, it was clear from the outset that total participation would have to fall.  The shared project of winning an election was past (read Rasmus Kleis Nielsen‘s work for more on this subject).

What’s more, Organizing for America faced a very real challenge specifically because of its offline participation.  If, in Charlottesville, all of those Obama campaign volunteers had stayed just as actively involved, how are they to distinguish between the Organizing for America leadership and the local Democratic Party apparatus?  You would have two competing claims to the mantle of “local democratic party,” with real resources and decision power at stake.  Those conditions are ripe for  internecine struggles within the party network.  As a result, OFA had to switch gears.  To cite lowered engagement levels now as an example of the weakness of digital activism is to misunderstand the shared project they were involved in to begin with, and also to hold new social movements to a standard not met by previous ones.

3. Ignoring the Critical Importance of Citizen’s United

Zelizer suggests that, thanks to Facebook politics, “Local candidates can rake in millions of dollars within days, and they can spread their name without anyone going door-to-door or holding fundraisers in the local Holiday Inn.”  Let’s try to keep some perspective here. The Washington Post has recently reported that much of this spending deluge is coming from secret sources, including corporations and uber-wealthy.  2010 isn’t just the facebook politics era, it’s also the post-Citizens United era.  In other words, the success of many of these candidates isn’t about the World Wide Web or social media.  It’s about secrecy and unvarnished pay-to-play power.

Likewise, we cannot properly understand the rise of the tea party movement without including Fox News Channel in our analysis.  As I’ve written before, separating the Tea Party as movement from the Tea Party as meme is particularly difficult given that these high-profile events and rallies are promoted nonstop by a partisan news channel whose chief contributors (Beck, Palin) are also the most visible figureheads of the Tea Party itself.  For every example of a Glen Beck rally, there’s a National Tea Party Convention getting canceled due to lagging ticket sales.  Estimating the size of the Tea Party in the absence of Fox News amplification is a tall order, but there’s great reason to think the media has routinely overestimated its size.

And Fox News is part of a broadcast media empire… hardly an exemplar of “facebook politics.”

To Sum it Up…

Both Zelizer and Gladwell make a useful distinction between strong ties and weak ties, but they mistakenly equate online activism with weak ties.  The reality is that social movements (and political campaigns) have always featured both.  The digital communications environment renders new opportunities for leveraging/forming social ties, both strong and weak.

If the Tea Party phenomenon turns out to be more Meme than Movement — if it is in fact primarily a media scaffolding for wealthy donors to pursue a post-Citizens United strategy — then Zelizer will be proven correct in his assertion that their movement will leave few residual institutions in the post-election environment. But he will have reached the right conclusion for the wrong reasons.  Digital activism is not as simple as “Facebook Politics,” and equating the Obama campaign with a hastily-drawn sketch of “facebook  politics” while overlooking the potentially-transformative impact of Citizen’s United and Fox News Channel obscures far than it reveals about the changing nature of 21st century political engagement.

White relies on several glorified fictions of what activism used to be like. ( y’know, back in the good old days of the 1990s, when Adbusters was cutting-edge.) seeing as how (a) the “generation shift” in US political advocacy is kind of my wheelhouse and (b) I’m a crotchety old-school environmental organizer, I feel the need to publicly reply.

Here’s (maybe) the worst passage:”The trouble is that [the MoveOn] model of activism uncritically embraces the ideology of marketing. It accepts that the tactics of advertising and market research used to sell toilet paper can also build social movements. This manifests itself in an inordinate faith in the power of metrics to quantify success. Thus, everything digital activists do is meticulously monitored and analysed. The obsession with tracking clicks turns digital activism into clicktivism.”

Hey Micah, ever hear of PIRG? Started by Ralph Nader in the 1970′s, the Public Interest Research Group is a central piece of the legacy progressive infrastructure on the left. Those canvassers who came to your door last week? Yeah, 90% chance they were part of the PIRGs (technically, employed by the Fund for Public Interest Research), regardless of what organization they were raising money for.

Now, I’m a longtime critic of the PIRG model, so my point here is that the left has been engaging in “the ideology of marketing” since long before Tim Berners-Lee came up with a graphical interface for the Series of Tubes. PIRG does some very good things, but by and large they promote a “vacuum cleaner sales” model of political activism — political action as “doors knocked,” “conversations held,” and. “dollars raised.”. That’s in lieu of political activism as power mapping, public narrative, and relational organizing. As Dana Fisher points out in Activism, Inc, the problem with the organization isn’t so much it’s model as it’s market share — there’s a niche for vacuum cleaner sales-techniques in the universe of political activism, but when that’s pretty much the only entry point for young organizers, you’ve got a problem.

MoveOn isn’t introducing a metrics-based approach to activism. They’re pioneering a better metrics-based approach. Those clickstream e-petitions are the first step in a Ladder-of-Engagement that also includes in-person rallies and other offline actions. The A/B testing means they can listen to their membership better than the older organizations, and often prompts them to take more radical positions than the legacy groups. That’s a very good thing, if well-done. And MoveOn, Democracy for America, the PCCC, Courage Campaign, 1Sky, 350.org and other Internet-mediated groups do it pretty damned well.

That’s not to say there isn’t a ton of bad digital activism out there. An e-petition alone is not a politically powerful act. Joining a Facebook group is not going to create a more Just society. Organizing is difficult, and there has always been plenty of crappy activism out there. The internet enables more of it, and also makes it easier to bump into.

But that isn’t the critique Micah White is making. He’s trying to claim that “a battle is raging for the soul of activism” between MoveOn and non-”clicktivist organizers. He wants to pretend that MoveOn has destroyed “faith in the power of ideas, or the poetry of deeds, to enact social change.” I’m sorry, but “the poetry of deeds???” I’ve been a leader in the US environmental movement for 14 years. I’ve run successful campaigns at the local, state, and national levels, and trained hundreds of young leaders in the process. And I’m primarily an old-school organizer — I’m used to training people using a flipchart and easel, every petition I’ve created has been ink-and-paper, and I used to organize one hell of a phone tree. Actual social justice organizing looks nothing like the fiction White compares digital activism to. Organizing is hard work. We create change by building power and mobilizing relationships, applying pressure on decision-makers that would prefer we went away. Real activism (to use White’s own phrase) isn’t about “the power of ideas or the poetry of deeds.”

There has always been a splinter-segment of social movement activism whose niche is composed of “culture jamming,” or works of subversive art. That’s where Adbusters lives, and vie always had a personal soft spot for those folks. Just as PIRG has it’s niche, it’s role in a broader, many-headed movement to make this world a better place to live, so does the more radical culture-jamming contingent. And those two edges of the spectrum have frankly never gotten along very well.

Micah White is trying to pretend that longstanding divide doesn’t exist. He wants the reader to believe that leftist activism has been his balliwick, but the Internet is dangerously cheapening it all under the guise of metrics-driven digital organizers. That’s sloppy thinking, and completely ahistorical. MoveOn doesn’t just do clickstream petitions, and the sophisticated new tools they’re developing can, when well-used, empower activists to accomplish things at the tactical level that the 1998-version of me wouldn’t have dreamed possible. Rather than attacking the new organizations, White should maybe spend some time studying social movement history. Or attend an organizers training… I could recommend a few good ones.

Nate Silver, it seems, has stumbled onto a sacred cow with his pollster rankings.  And, true to form, John Zogby has penned a petulant “Note to Nate,” placed prominently on the Huffington Post, in reply.  Zogby’s tone aims for “old pro, advising the young hotshot,” but his prose misses the mark by a loooooong shot.

My favorite passages in his reply are titled (yes, there are titles for each paragraph) “Understand that there’s much more to being a good pollster” and “appreciate innovation.”  In the former, he suggests that being a pollster is actually all about the people-skills and poses the question, “your ratings come with and generate a lot of vitriol.  How does that make our world a better place?”  In the latter, he compares the internet polling of Zogby international with Columbus discovering America and Roentgen discovering the x-ray.  At least he didn’t compare himself to Jonas Salk.

What’s most striking to me in Zogby’s reply is the blatant revelation of “guild-status” within the polling community.  Y’know why nobody has done pollster rankings before Nate Silver?  Because it’s a lot of work, not easily to monetize, and doesn’t make you any friends.  In the world of professional pollsters, it’s impolite to aggregate the numbers and actually publish rankings.  That can cost people money!  And (directly following Zogby’s logic) the polls aren’t supposed to be predictive anyway (even if they’re pitched and used that way by the media), they’re supposed to aid “data-based problem-solvers,” whatever THAT means.

Guilds are a classic organizational form.  They are often a good thing – generally, if a task is difficult and undervalued, guilds can help to pool knowledge, allow for standards-setting and accreditation, and enable collective action.  But in the midst of disruptive shifts in technology (particularly information technology), they essentially create a privileged in-group that guards against the revelation of their own weaknesses and failings, seeking to punish outsiders and protect their cherished turf.  The early 21^st century has been rife with guild-based sacred-cow gorings, and it has not been pretty.

And that’s my open message to John Zogby.  Your “Note to Nate” ain’t pretty, and it ain’t classy.  Silver is advancing public understanding of polling.  If he isn’t doing it well enough, then you have all the incentive in the world to do better.  Your guild of pollsters (which, supported by the high operating costs and a norm of not promoting “vitriol” seems to have prompted at least one huckster to flat-out fabricate polls) is coming apart at the seams, largely because of changes in the communications environment.  If Zogby International is as innovative as you claim, then I’m sure your company will adapt to the new climate.  In the meantime, maybe try not to write tacky open letters like this one so much…

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 has become an immediate hit among political campaign professionals on twitter.

In the course of receiving ridicule on the cable talk shows (or at least Olbermann and Maddow, which I’m currently recording for a new data collection project), Fiorina’s ad has also gotten heavy play.  Therein lies its brilliance.  This campaign commercial was obviously never meant for the mass media airwaves.  It’s 3:21 long!  What the Fiorina campaign has done is craft something goofy enough to go viral — based not on its message, but on its amateurish nature.  In so doing, clips from the video get bootstrapped into the mainstream media and the major political blogs.

Now this approach has its downside.  The news frame is around how ridiculous Fiorina’s campaign is, rather than around her opponent’s fiscal record.  Stories about campaign mismanagement are not generally viewed as a positive.  Likewise, I personally can’t recall the name of the opponent in this attack ad, and I’ve watched it several times already.  For attack ads to stick, your audience probably has to know who is being attacked (particularly in a big open primary where we can’t just default to “the other guy”).

Nonetheless, I’d be interested to see just how much this “campaign ad” cost to produce.  If I had to guess, I’d say “peanuts.”  And at a cost of peanuts, I’d say the payoff is pretty impressive.  Fiorina’s opponent as “FCINO – Fiscal Conservative in Name Only” is approaching meme status, and getting heavy play in youtube remixes.  Compare that to the costs and payoffs from an everyday attack ad, produced to be actually aired, a few weeks before the election.  They almost belong as separate budgetary line-items.  There are “real” ads, which seek to move the dial through resource-intensive mainstream media political persuasion, and there are “youtube” ads, which seek to go viral and thus attract a lot of earned media (campaign-speak for free coverage on the news shows) at practically no cost.

To the extent that youtube ads are a new genre in and of themselves, “demonsheep” is a hit.  It’s a hit specifically because of its lo-fi feel, inviting ridicule of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 variety.  In this new arena of campaign communications, the goal is to be remixed, mocked, or copied.  As with so much of youtube’s content, it seems that “be original, be humorous” is the categorical imperative.