Features > November 26, 2007
iPower to the People (cont’d)
“The idea that MTV should be subsidized for contributing to public service is wrongheaded,” Chester wrote on his blog at the Center for Digital Democracy. “Journalism foundations such as Knight and [journalism schools] should be holding the media industry’s editorial feet to the fire, shaming them to spend more money on serious journalism.” But what that serious journalism might look like in this environment is still unclear.
Disintermediated Democrats
User-driven online platforms are not only reshaping the media landscape but shaking up the way candidates communicate with voters. Digital tools played a signal role in the 2004 election, and tools have now permeated other facets of election planning, from communications to fundraising to field operations.
Less than a year out from the election, the presidential campaigns are in R&D mode, experimenting with digital engagement tools while still trying to maintain obligations to older forms of political communication. This tension is reflected in the proliferation of debate formats.
On the Democratic side, the September Dartmouth debate was one of six approved by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) through the end of 2007. As tradition would have it, the party organized all six in conjunction with at least one mainstream news network.
For their part, advocacy groups have been partnering with niche cable channels to host debates that hone in on particular issues. Since April, the Democratic candidates have tangled at two historically black colleges and the NAACP convention, at the YearlyKos and AFL-CIO gatherings in Chicago, on LGBT channel LOGO and Spanish-language channel Univision, and on PBS in conjunction with AARP.
But the proliferation of debates has robbed these proceedings of some of their thunder. In a more closed mainstream echo chamber, for example, the debate on gay and lesbian issues would have likely generated an uproar that resonated through the rest of the election. However, in our multichannel, multiplatform world, such narrowcast debates no longer carry the same emblematic heft.
While special-interest organizations still stand as a proxy between citizens and candidates, online participatory campaigning promises to reduce the degree of separation and artifice to nearly nil. In the business world, this is known as “disintermediation”—or cutting out the middleman. Its star pupil is Amazon.com, which has disintermediated many an independent bookstore out of existence.
Advocates of participatory politics bemoan the fact that civil rights, environmental and consumer protection organizations that once depended on the support and convictions of their members have ossified into Beltway-bound fundraising machines, more interested in obtaining direct mail lists than in working together to advance movements for change.
“Political power is more and more situated in far-flung networks that can be activated and deactivated quickly,” writes blogger and online organizer Matt Stoller at OpenLeft.com. “And the new millennial generation that will be the political backbone for the new progressive America likes it this way.”
Techpresident.com—a group blog managed by the Personal Democracy Forum, a site that explores the ways that technology is changing politics—tracks the use of online social networking tools by the campaigns. The Obama campaign, especially, has aggressively pursued voters via online tools. As of Sept. 28, it was leading all other Democratic candidates. (See chart.)
In addition to Obama’s sizeable MySpace and Facebook presence, his campaign has developed its own active social network, MyBarackObama.com. And by mid-October, the campaign had attracted more than 180,000 friends on the niche social network site BlackPlanet.com.
By recruiting “friends” on both broad and targeted social networks, and then offering campaign-focused tools on its own site, the Obama campaign is providing online channels for individual voters to become more involved. Social networks also allow users to bond with one another, creating a different kind of connection to the campaign. Forging such personal ties can be as—if not more—important to voters than appealing to them on policy positions. As psychologist Drew Westen writes in The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, “In politics, when reason and emotion collide, emotion invariably wins.”
Of course, the role of these technologies in politics is still evolving, and entertainment still trumps politics online. To the chagrin of the other candidates, comedian Stephen Colbert’s late bid for the presidency led a Facebook group called “1,000,000 Strong for Stephen T. Colbert” to gather more than 1 million members in just over a week, overstretching the site’s servers and becoming its most popular political destination.
Building a better debate
For political observers like Micah Sifry, co-founder of Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) and editor of Techpresident.com, the more online access that voters have to candidates and to one another, the better. A long-time political writer and expert on third-party politics, Sifry first sensed a shift in the dynamics of voter engagement during the 2004 race, when his brother David Sifry, founder of blog search engine Technorati, dragged him to a conference of open source programmers, social software developers and science fiction writers. There he found kindred spirits.
“It felt like a gathering of the tribes,” says Sifry. Even though the Dean campaign had just collapsed, there was “a lot of excitement about how technology was going to change the structure of politics.”
Sifry noticed that conference participants were using chat tools to communicate about the conference live. Known as a “backchannel,” such conversations can quickly evolve into online content, broadening access to events. After that experience, Sifry found traditional political conferences as out of step. “The progressive side is playing its game in a very old way,” he says. “Middle-class progressives are very unaware of how elite their styles are.” This insight led him to work with entrepreneur and technology consultant Andrew Rasiej to co-found PDF.
Even online, candidates are engaging in a style of “campaign management that is still top-down and cautious,” Sifry says. The key to analyzing experiments like the MySpace debate is “judging whether or not there’s some change in the normal conversation with a candidate. People can e-mail in questions; so what? People have been able to use 800 numbers for years. The question [is] how it changes the dialogue.”
PDF is taking a shot at changing the dialogue with its own presidential forum, 10Questions (www.10Questions.com). The group worked with Colarusso from Community Counts to build on his video voting site. Although the New York Times editorial board and MSNBC.com will present top-ranked questions to candidates, the questions won’t be filtered through a journalist. Instead, users can post questions on a variety of video sharing platforms—including YouTube, MySpace, Yahoo Video and Blip.tv—and tag them as “10Questions” to be included for consideration. Audience members for the site will then vote on the 10 best questions and candidates will be invited to post video answers through the end of the year.
Compared to the hyperbole of the MySpace presidential dialogue page, the 10Questions site is low key. The requisite red-and-blue design elements are there, but a basic grid of videos with thumbs up/thumbs down logos are set against a plain white background. So far, the most popular videos seem serious.
Third party candidates are welcome to submit their answers, too, as long as their party “has achieved or is likely to achieve a line on the ballot in enough states to hypothetically win an electoral-college majority.” The site does not accept advertising, and sponsorship is free. Sponsors range from conservative pundit Michelle Malkin to the Capitol Hill tabloid Politico to lefty radio station Air America.
Rasiej, who is funding 10Questions out of his own pocket, says “the political system is going through massive changes.” He notes the Internet now serves as the “ringmaster” for election coverage, unlike in previous elections when professional journalists primarily covered politics. And he suggests that reporters set context and point audiences to quality sources of online information instead of serving as gatekeepers. “The power is in the hands of the voter,” he says.
But participatory online politics are a partial solution for engaging a broad swath of the electorate. While the barriers to entry for citizens who want to create media or become involved in campaigns have dropped dramatically in the last few years, such activities still require time, equipment and online access—not to mention inclination. Getting people interested in elections is an uphill battle, especially if they feel alienated by politics-as-usual. The bulk of do-it-yourself digital media has little to do with political issues and even less to do with presidential campaigns.
For example, as of Oct. 26, of the 83 questions posted to 10Questions, only two videos were from participants who aren’t white. This reflects no prejudice on the part of the site’s organizers, but rather a structural gap in the demographics of online politics. The assumptions of the site—that presidential politics are relevant to the lives of ordinary citizens, that candidates will answer the questions posed to them and that they’ll tell the truth when they do—may hold little appeal to voters who have too often been marginalized in elections.
Social justice activists have found their own online tools for mobilizing constituencies and applying pressure to politicians from outside the system. In mid-September, more than 10,000 people travled to Jena, La., to protest the racially biased sentencing of six black students. Online organizing—across platforms such as ColorOfChange.org, the African-American blogosphere, YouTube and Wikipedia—was central to mobilizing this groundswell. “The big-name civil rights figures had to scramble to catch up with Jena,” writes Matt Compton in the online journal The Democratic Strategist. “[T]he organizing came together from the bottom up.” The model resonates far beyond the point-and-click polling of online democracy.
While opening political discussion through digital tools is worthwhile, virtual democracy neeeds broader reforms to address basic inequities in the political system. Many barriers remain: from laws passed in more than a half-dozen states (including Florida and Ohio) that discourage groups like the League of Women Voters and ACORN from running voter registration drives, to lingering questions about vote fraud involving electronic ballot machines, to the disproportionate influence that the electoral college system grants to voters in “swing states.” If as much was being invested in opening up our voting system as is in opening up our media system, real change could happen.
It’s one thing to engage voters. It’s another to enfranchise them. When both happen, we can start talking about empowerment.
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