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Interesting article in The New York Times, How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power, says, “Like a lot of Web innovators, the Obama campaign did not invent anything completely new. … when he arrives at 1600 Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama will have not just a political base, but a database, millions of names of supporters who can be engaged almost instantly. And there’s every reason to believe that he will use the network not just to campaign, but to govern.
Excerpts from the article:
- His e-mail message to supporters on Tuesday night included the line, “We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next.” The incoming administration is already open for business on the Web at Change.gov, a digital gateway for the transition.
- The Bush campaign arrived at the White House with a conviction that it would continue a conservative revolution with the help of Karl Rove’s voter lists, phone banks and direct mail. But those tools were crude and expensive compared with what the Obama camp is bringing to the Oval Office.
- The juxtaposition of a networked, open-source campaign and a historically imperial office will have profound implications and raise significant questions. Special-interest groups and lobbyists will now contend with an environment of transparency and a president who owes them nothing. The news media will now contend with an administration that can take its case directly to its base without even booking time on the networks.
- “Thomas Jefferson used newspapers to win the presidency, F.D.R. used radio to change the way he governed, J.F.K. was the first president to understand television, and Howard Dean saw the value of the Web for raising money,” said Ranjit Mathoda, a lawyer and money manager who blogs at Mathoda.com. “But Senator Barack Obama understood that you could use the Web to lower the cost of building a political brand, create a sense of connection and engagement, and dispense with the command and control method of governing to allow people to self-organize to do the work.”
- Like every other presidency, the Obama administration will have its battles with the media, but that may seem like patty-cake if it runs afoul of the self-publishing, self-organizing democracy it helped create — say, by delaying health care legislation or breaking a promise on taxes.
- “It’s clear there has been a dramatic shift,” said Andrew Rasiej, the founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference about the intersection of politics and technology. “Any politician who fails to recognize that we are in a post-party era with a new political ecology in which connecting like minds and forming a movement is so much easier will not be around long.
If you’re interested in what a digital presidency might look like, you should take a look at my essay, the Coming Digital Presidency, which led to my interview with Mr. Carr of the New York Times.
http://mathoda.com/archives/189
This is nice but I think the digital divide is still large and presents quite a challenge as there are still considerable ethnic and racial disparities in access to technology.
I am not a facebook person, but am not sure how this will work. You might be able to have some sort of policy worked out like wikipedia articles, that become a kind of shared wisdom, so that you don’t have industries or their lobbyists or ideological think tanks writing the legislation. However wikipedia doesn’t work in highly motivated, controversial areas where ideas diverge rather than converge.
Once you get on an email list you start getting into spam management, guessing what to read and what to delete.
One function of democracy is that there is a group conversation (the town meeting for instance) rather than a series of individual conversations. A danger of individual conversations is that they tell you what you want to hear, with tailored messages, as happen when you write your Congresspeople. Internet blogs can be a town meeting, but most blogs I’ve seen, including this one, end up with a handful of regulars talking to each other. Even when they all disagree about things, I’m not sure they resolve anything, or will necessarily help policy makers who read them. Even one like Al Jazeera’s where you appear to have people from around the world discussing the world’s most volatile issues, seem to repeat the same arguments over and over in response to whatever events come up.
Today most of the town meetings seem to take place between pundits. In theory talk radio performs that but mostly it generates emotions and demenas people rather than generating any positive policy.
Carter began his presidency with a series of town meetings, which weren’t continued, and we know how his administration turned out. Clinton did some similar things with health care reform, with Hillary in charge, although the real plan was written by insurance industry insiders. It ws ultimately defeated after the industries (doctors, drug companies, insurance companies, employers) could not agree. A lot of this is like “photo opportunities” and exist to manipulate the public rather than govern effectively, with the real decision making happening in closed quarters. Pollsters also conduct focus groups, but these have no power, and are often used by politicians as well as sellers of consumer products for marketing purposes.Assuming Obama actually wants to use the internet to make government more effective, instead of just using it to manipulate the public more effectively. Somehow the internet people must get a place at the table, and someone must admit them and weigh what they say. How do you do this?