Digital Democracy Teach-in
Here’s the current draft (still under discussion) of the description of the session I’m leading at the O’Reilly Digital Democracy Teach-in:
The common wisdom — that the Internet is just one more tool in the campaign box — is wrong. Experience so far seems to show that to effectively using the Internet means giving up some of the most basic assumptions about the nature of campaigns as top-down, one-to-many, marketing efforts. This raises more questions than answers: Is the Internet reshaping campaigns, political parties and the electorate? Are the most important effects of the Internet the ones we expect or are they emergent? Are any of emergent effects apparent yet? If using the Internet effectively means remaking a campaign in its end-to-end image, will only certain campaigns use it? Is the excitement about the Internet’s role that of early adopters? What is the role of a candidate – and a leader – in an Internet-based campaign? We will share what we’ve learned so far and discuss all these issues and more in a conversational and interactive session.
I’m supposed to talk for 15-20 minutes and then lead a directed discussion with the audience, in the majestic style of Jeff Jarvis‘ brilliant session at BloggerCon. Ulp. But there will be a really interesting bunch of people in the audience I can call upon.
I’m thinking of beginning my presentation by saying that there’s an existential paradox at the heart of voting. It’s not a logical paradox, but one that we live: We’re individuals voting our hearts but we are reduced to being merely one among millions. We let ourselves be reduced to a simple binary switch — ballots are T/F exams, not essays — and we rejoice in it.
This then would lead me to talk about the paradox of massed individuals that I think the Dean campaign’s use of the Internet has begun to crack: How do you scale personal involvement? The old broadcast model of politics can’t do it…
The Digital Democracy Teach-in happens Feb. 9 in San Diego, the day before the O’Reilly Emerging Tech sessions start.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Jock Gill (one of your co-contributors at GreaterDemocracy.org) and I have exchanged a number of emails on this topic. He’s expressed concerns that I’m advocating a plebiscite in saying that our representative democracy does not serve us as it has in the past. It’s a strong argument; we don’t want America to follow California’s example of politics as a popularity contest, changing with the wind. I don’t think I’m advocating such a model. I believe there’s an immediacy to having the trigger in one’s own hands, an authenticity otherwise removed by the current representative system. It’s hard to feel engaged when one can’t be certain that one’s vote has been diluted or lost in translation through a representative.
Of course there will be a natural correlation between who uses the internet for politics; one look at UCLA’s Center for Communications Policy Internet Reports for the last three years to see there is a much lower rate of use by citizens 45 years of age and older, in direct proportion to age. (It will be essential to ensure that all citizens have access to what ever emerges as internet and the political process evolves. There must be an analog system as a fallback, let alone as a guarantee of constitutional rights.) Surely the massing of individuals via internet offers something of value in spite of this bias towards younger voters. We can “tell the future”, based on the aggregate values the connected. We can report with granularity results of voting, without being a yes/no proposition only. We may approach a more neutral, diverse leadership were we to be able to vote purely on issues and not on the that which is visual (a candidate’s gender or race).
I’m sure there’s more value here, but I’m being pulled away right now and can’t elaborate. Ah, to be able to have a global conversation about politics on a Sunday morning over the internet; yet real life still intrudes and asks us to deal with the local.
Damn real life!
:)
Scattered Notes
Scattered Notes Just trying to correlate some things: Dave Weinberger blogged an interesting question: “How do you scale personal involvement?”….
Hey, did you catch this by Prof. Morton Horowitz??
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/archive/001781.html
It’s stirring a little buzz. Perhaps the issue isn’t the that the internet is/isn’t a campaign tool in any sense, but it IS the political process itself. We are merely witnessing the paradigm shift of the analog to the digital which starts with the campaign; at some point everyone will have access to the digital. It arrives with the convergence of technology. Who does not have television? telephone? cable? a PC? a cell phone? At some point all these technologies converge and become ubiquitous. Everyone has them — and those that don’t must or they will risk losing their rights as Horowitz descrbes.
I’d just posted a comment at Radio Free Blogistan about the Thierer misinterpretation of Dean Policy and the subsequent disagreements…I’d said that the internet is a conversation (sound familiar?). Speech. What does it look like once every citizen has access? Do citizens participate more frequently, or do they check out from overexposure? How do we get to that point in the conversation from where we are today, with the least amount of disruption?
How open can a campaign be?
David Weinberger was slated to give this talk at the Oreilly Digital Democracy Teach In, but he , but he