Transparency, Comments and Power

'd. - none of the above'

First of all: a shoutout to techPresident for being a great resource for thinking about the relationship between technology and politics.  Full of consistently engaging and challenging work, and just generally pretty dope.

Anyways – the much-ado about Obama’s plan to use the internet to govern needs some fleshing out.  The key remains changing the internet from a tool of access and transparency into a tool for people (writ-large) to make decisions.  Questions remain about how to transform feedback and criticism into decision-making authority, and transparency into power for the people viewing.  As it stands, the folks in government being monitored by internet-tools often still have the authority to act as they please, even if hundreds of thousands of voices dissent.

At the very least, internet tools put into more explicit terms the incongruencies of power and time that define the modern bureaucracy.  In the same way that I think that Obama’s Presidency throws into better contrast certain types of exploitation (and makes certain new stridant critiques more sayable), internet transparency movements do the work of making critiques of state power more visible and potent.

The Internet as Secondary Textuality

a paper for a class.  Published here for the sake of making my education feel like it matters.

” Internet communications technology represents the most highly developed process of what Walter Ong calls “Technologizing the Word” in his book Orality and Literacy. According to Ong, communication technologies break ‘the word’ from the context of the world in oral communication and give it an independent life in space and time via print and electronic media, a process that renders unique attitudes towards the word and the psychological concepts that surround it. Internet-based communication creates a new stage in the long process of technologizing the word, transcending ‘secondary orality’ by abstracting the word into a flexible visual space united by hyperlinks and criss-crossed by search technologies that give new life to words as independent entities.

Notes on Political Strategy on the Internet

so so exhausted. Reportback and thoughts from the last week in Pinocchio land.

First: I think it’s time to rethink the fundamental units of activism.  Creating change might require breaking from organizations that identify as ‘campaigns’ or ‘coalitions’ with their highly structured relationships and instead develop protocols for affiliating more flexibly.  Broad networks of individuals with diverse but aligned interests identify with certain points of unity and then work together on particular projects or interventions.  For instance, with this campaign, the news cycle moved faster than Pinocchio folks could react, partially because we drew on too small a group of people to work with, owing to the (relative) narrowness of the campaign vs. the scope of the whole election season.  The most damaging moments of the election so far came via short-term (and funny…) events: McCain’s “celeb” ads and backlash, Letterman’s soliloquy on McCain, Tina Fey as Palin, the insane shit at McCain/Palin rallies… each of these developed short, punchy narratives that fit into a broader constellation of ideas without ever cohering into a narrative arc per se.  The only thing that developed into its own issue this election season was the economy, and that moved so fast few folks had time to react to it – suggesting the usefulness of organizing more generally, and then focusing on rapid, narrower interventions.

Second, working on internet distribution requires a carefully cultivated voice and tone.  This isn’t like sending out press releases; effective net-action means a commitment to producing good content and commentary consistently.  Obama is winning the media war partially because he’s so personable.  People like him, and so blogs (primarily) willingly enlist to his cause and become force multipliers.  That’s how smaller operations should strive to work as well – by working to make other blogs willing force-multipliers for a message.

The blog-world (BLOG-O-SPHERE) is an echo chamber, where people link and read other folks that more or less agree with them.  Tight knit groups form and ideas travel party through recency and newsworthiness (who gets the breaks first), but moreso by making interesting commentary around the news of the day.  Generally, people who write smart things well will become more successful (though doubtless there’s more to it, a method to the madness).  This means that groups wanting to put out material via blogs need to consistently build a voice that makes them sound like folks that know what they’re doing – a bit of insider baseball, so to speak.  The author of content needs credibility just as the content needs to be credible, and that requires work ahead of time to get things going.

This is why everyone that affiliates with an organization that wants to work blogs should blog themselves – either under the name of the group or under their own name.  It allows them to develop an ethos for distribution, and to control the first impressions of work they produce, because it (hopefully) means that people come to you for content.  Instead of having to blast out emails about new work press release style, you can rely on the credibility built up over time, or have folks regularly reading your work to the point where they willingly distribute your work for you.

Obama and JFK – More than Meets the Eye

Obama doesn’t interest me that much as a candidate, but I think he gives off symbolic sparks that are really fascinating.  As the first black candidate to make it past the primaries, he receives a lot of attention as a symbol (racism is always about symbolic meaning making, turning skin into something more), but I think there’s more to it.

I finally finished reading Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, and it reminded me of the Obama- JFK analogy, which I think deserves more (critical) attention.  What set me off was the prolific tweaking of John McCain’s poor internet skillz, a focus of internet blogs in particular.  The JFK comes in to the picture with the now classic 1960 presidential debates, between Kennedy and Nixon.

The conventional wisdom was that the debates turned the tide for Kennedy because of his television appearance – the television audience believed Kennedy won the debates, those listening on radio thought Nixon bested JFK.  In the same way, Obama embraces the internet aesthetic in a way John McCain doesn’t – for better or worse.

I think the twistup over McCain’s stupid ads proves the point – the original intent of the ad, got lost in the fray of detailed analysis on blogs (perhaps in some cases reflexive television shows, but I won’t name any), cutting apart the ad into a million pieces then about each one.  The point is this: instead of  undermining the Obama-fervor, which is a very salient tactic, a very cinematic ad -  full of Moses and subtle Hitler analogies – turned into a YouTube ad, where folks got the chance to argue about it, turning it back around into an argument for rallying the troops again.  It took the attention off more flip-flops (offshore oil anyone?), and put the attention on the scourge that is McCain.

The McCain campaign seems to forget that bloggers are force multipliers, but they only fall in line when piqued by a campaign running ads that suit the YouTube aesthetic – standing up to substantive critique via the internetz, that doesn’t rely on mere scare tactics, but with particular attention to campaign environment that will talk not just about the ads (right, wrong, etc.), but about the attitudes and dispositions of the makers of that ad, talking about them as strategy in the first place.  That’s the real insight: in a world of the desktop pundit, some of the most mobilized citizens will take up the issue of how and why campaigns run, not just debate the facts of talking points.

The one tripping point for the Obamaniacs: in the JFK-Nixon debates, the TV audience was large enough to swing the election to JFK.  In this election I’m not convinced the same is true for the Obama camp.  I think the McCain ads will reach enough people in the right way to require a more hard-hitting old-media strategy from the Obama camp to make the magic happen in November