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Howard Rheingold on Using the Internet in Politics
Roland Piquepaille writes "The latest issue of BusinessWeek Magazine, dated March 29, 2004, contains a special report, 'Click The Vote,' which states that 'in the age of Internet politics, the Web can make or break a candidate.' The online version of this report includes an interview of Howard Rheingold, 'A Major Change in the Political Equation.' This overview contains selected excerpts about what is the essential impact of the Internet on politics today or what are the benefits to using the Internet in politics. Finally, if you want to discover the universe of Smart Mobs, be sure to visit regularly the Smart Mobs collective weblog."
Chris Lilik is a one-man political action committee. Powered by a high-speed computer he assembled himself,
Now, that's a rather casual way of revealing he's a cyborg, isn't it?
The coolest voice ever.
Like the German cannibal who met and ate a willing victim he found on the net?
"If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments." Earl Wilson
in the age of Internet politics, the Web can make or break a candidate
If you ask me, the press and major political parties still have that power. When you are in this industry, it may seem the Web is a new world with new rules, but it's just another technology that exists in the status quo world we have always lived in. And 'smart mob' is just another example of an overblown concept.
If they're going to self-organize Meetups, contribute millions of dollars, and have a blog in which they're making suggestions, they're going to want to have a bit of a say.
Yep, political parties and PAC's are real good at top-down "grassroots organizing" (i.e. sign this petition, write this e-mail). But how long before we have an organization that effectively uses technology to give members a real say in the vision and the guiding of the organization?
"Social theorist Howard Rheingold predicts that power in the Information Age will coalesce around groups of networked people who organize behind a single idea, from politics to fashion, and connect using the Internet and cell phones. He calls them Smart Mobs, and he sees them starting to take shape." Sounds a bit like /.'ers /.'ing
Given how fast bogus rumours such as the teddy bear virus move around the internet, and how hard they are to kill, the internet represents and easy way to anonymously disseminiate dis-information about a candidate. Imagine the same crowd who thump forward buttons without reading the message sending a bogus picture of a presidential candidate in a photoshopped picture. Oh, wait, that really happened..
It would seem that the internet's anonymity, lack of authentication, and high-susceptibility to automation makes it easy for groups or issues to appear more poular and populous than they really are. There is no gaurantee that the "thousands" writing in support of some position aren't one person or even one non-U.S. citizen.
I wonder when some pressure group will use spammer's tricks (zombie machines and scripts that spew thousands of automated messages) to flood political forums, blogs, write-in campaigns etc.
I'm not saying that the internet is not a wonderous medium for publishing ideas and sharing insights into pressing issues, only that it represents a potentially corruptible, biased sample on popular opinion.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I think the benefits of integrating the internet into political campaigns have always been pretty simple and obvious. For one thing, it gives voters the opportunity to get a much more detailed look into candidates. Televised debates are always limited by time (and censors) and printed information is always limited by space (and censors), but in the online world people can really dig in to the nitty-gritty.
There are also times when a candidate doesn't answer all the questions voters have in their minds. Online campaign sites give them opportunities to really interact back and forth. Potential voters can ask questions and candidates (or their PR people) can answer back quickly.
Online sites also allow for much larger forums of debate and collaboration for campaigns. Rallies can quickly be arranged or mini-campaign fundraisers can be held across town or across the country without having direct contact with the campaign staff.
And these are just the obvious benefits-- most of which, I've already seen put to good use.
KappaStone
For those who don't remember President Truman (probably 99% of the people here), he was an incumbent underdog running for reelection against Thomas Dewey in 1948. The polls showed Dewey winning by a large margin, to the point that one of the New York papers preprinted their post-Election Day issue with the now-infamous headline Dewey Beats Truman. Truman won the election. It turned out the pollsters were doing their work by telephone, at a time when a significant number of voters still didn't have them. Because their polling methodology was flawed, the results were, as well.
What does this have to do with Dean? Simply this: the people who get out and vote, especially in primaries, are not the high tech Meet Upsters that drew so much attention. While the techsters are more than willing to contribute online (just another form of online shopping), fewer are willing to get out and talk to their neighbors and fellow voters (as opposed to taking a field trip to another state for a day or two), much less actually do the grunt work involved in actually going out and voting.
How many of you who email Congress at the drop of a hat have taken the time and postage to mail a letter to your local Congresscritter (snail mail is taken more seriously by Congressional staffers)? How many of you who went to a Meet Up actually went to the polls and voted?
Until folks understand that technology is an enabling tool, not a magic bullet, politics as usual will continue to be the norm. And, until folks understand that the vast majority of voters in this country are not looking at who's using the sexiest technology, but who's pushing the right buttons, the techogeeks will continue to be confined to the infrastructure, rather than the policy making area.
That brings the unique capability of the Internet to connect people with shared interests, together with the ability to perform some kind of action in the face-to-face world...
One of the problems with this mirrors the real world scenario, except that it allows for it to happen much faster. Being that people tend to gravitate towards others who share their beliefs and ideals more easily. Doing this gives them bolsters their opinion that "They are Right", and they tend to shut out opposing views.
Of course, it can be argued that the opposite is also true. That the internet allows people to more easily find other viewpoints and expand their knowledge. Nevertheless, it is much harder (perhaps by subconscious choice) to find opposing viewpoints, and give a requisite amount of credibility to them - one must be trying to prove themselves wrong, or at least see if they can, and a great number of people do not like to be proven wrong - no matter how far fetched or unfounded their ideas may seem.
Lets see: according to comScore Media Metrix in february johnkerry.com had over 1 mil. visits (103% growth), representing his success in the democrats presidential preliminary election. There were also 14% increase (compared to previous month) in the overall visitors in the politics cathegory in US making a total of 16 visitors in Feb. John Edvards site had 480,000 visitors (+60%), Dean and Clark got 355,000 (-50%) and 185,000 (-50) visitors, respectively. I guess that underlines the weight of the Net in politics in the coming elections ...
Locke for Hegemon!
I agree, he's got that exclusive I was in the WELL when the internet was young I am an innovator thing going on.
Check out his website for yourself: http://www.rheingold.com/index.html
I personally know a number of academics much smarter and more articulate than all these psuedo-intellectuals who are always getting published and asked for comment. Big deal, any kid in secondary school from here on in is going to treat the web as their primary political tool - they will look back on us and think we were mad for sitting in front of televisions or letting newspaper "opinion makers" and pundits dictate the agendas. They will see reviewing their local candidates blogs, submitting no-cost online freedom of information requests (or just browsing all non-military government documents in an open database) as perfectly normal and marvel at how primitive and distant our relationship with government is now.
This is self-evident, we have know it for years. Why is this guy special for basically stating the obvious?
hell, I should come up with some catch phrases like "flash democracy" and "mobile democracy" and "insta protests" and maybe even "insta flash intellectuals".
If you ask me, the press and major political parties still have that power.
This is true right now. However, this will eventually begin to change. Just because the article overstated things abit does not change the validity of the point it is trying to make.
Eventually, paper publication and television broadcast popularity will begin to dwindle as people can more effectly replace those media forms with internet content (of many different types).
In addition to changing how candidates market themselves, it inernet also might change who is electable. Because it is easier to create and distribute online content to the masses, third/obscure partie members and independents will (hopefully) have a better chance in the US government.
Howard Dean had a tremendous online following and couldn't even come close to locking up the Democratic nomination. John Kerry has a website, but I seriously doubt he has even a modest amount of understanding of what the Internet can be used to do.
Yes, the Internet is important as a medium to use in reaching an important voter demographic. But it's not as important as television (yet) because the senior and low-income demographics are larger and have higher voter turn out.
The senior population is the largest it's ever been in recorded history and it's going to get even larger. That's why Social Security is often called the third rail of politics...touch it and you die. Most seniors don't know squat about the Internet except that 60 Minutes tells them pedophiles love it and kids use it to watch porn and plan school shootings. Sarcastic, I know, but the point is that that television is what informs that demographic.
Similarly, the low-income demographic is large and is often the target of "bussing"...a practice whereby a candidate dependent on voter turn out hires out charter buses to carry low-income voters from their homes/apartments/projects to voting stations in their district. These are largely not people that are reachable via the Internet.
Kudos to all the candidates thus far who have taken their message online. It shows a degree of thoroughness that is admirable. But the Internet has not become make-or-break for national politicians yet.
My sigs always suck.
20 posts and still no Gore-Invented-The-Internet reference?!
What is Slashdot coming to these days...
I read Rheingold's book on his days at the WELL. First of all, what Rheingold seems to gloss over, was that the Well was a BBS. As in, the one that you dial into. not a Web BBS.
What's really annoying about his book, is his tone that the Well was the only interesting, progressive BBS *ever*. He wasn't on Compuserve or GEnie in the old days, so he has no fucking idea what he's talking about, but because the Well was made up of Bay area intellectuals, they thing the experience only pertained to them.
I'm a somewhat old timer when it comes to this stuff, I started BBSing in the early 80s. I found his book insulting and incredibly egotistic.
Back-in-the-day the dot-coms had an amazing array of metrics: it's hits - no, it's page-views, no - it's eyeballs, it's stickyness, it's repeat visitors, it's burn-rate...
Of course we look back and find it amusing that profit was never a metric.
This conference was more of the same. Lots of metrics and requirements tossed about (money raised, page views, video clips on your site, etc.) but the currency of politics is a vote and votes didn't seem to be dicussed much as a metric.
The hype was there. Once again I heard that "the iinternet changes everything" and about the need to be a "first-mover". We heard repeated comments about how the great Dean and his sidekick Trippi had come down from the mount to show us to the promised internet land and stories about the amazing internet campaign to get Clark to run. But where are they now? Clark merely dropped out but following a butt-kicking up and down the campaign trail, Dean's head was handed to him on a platter. This is the advantage of using the internet??
In fact, it was almost as instructive to see who was not well represented: people from the Bush and Kerry campaigns. I guess they are too busy getting actual votes.
Sure, the internet is becoming a more important tool in politics and it was fun meeting the techies but at the end of the conference my colleagues and I had exactly the same reaction: we've been here before.
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"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
Dean launched an unprecedented internet-based effort to recruit and mobilize supporters around the country. It really showcased the power of the net and helped to quickly push Dean to front-runner status. But even with all that support and publicity, Dean didn't win a single primary.
Well before the "I have a scream" speech, Dean's fate was sealed in large part due to the excessive publicity and daily coverage he received as the front-runner. It seems unlikely that any candidate can hold up for months on end prior to the elections under that kind of scrutiny without taking a few missteps.
The internet can certainly be a powerful promotional tool, but too much publicity can be a bad thing.
As the techonologies of the net become more and more mainstream, one of the big benefits that I see is the leveraging of internet technologies to bring together smaller parties and groups that would otherwise be marginalized. In a two party system where the deck is definately stacked for the mainstream (e.g. minimum poll numbers required to participate in a presidential debate, Minimum precent of votes in the previous prez. election to qualify for matching federal funds, it is illegal in some states to register as anything other than democrat/republican, etc.) The internet is that it can be used to help organize smaller marginalized grassroots campaigns without the need for a huge budget for publicity/marketing.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with the politics of these groups, making it easier for them to get their word out forces may force the two major candidates to take a stance on issues that would rather not talk about (e.g. abortion in 2000 election, deficit during Perot timeframe, etc.). . . and this makes for a healthier political system in general.
-kgj
They also pointed out at my class that politicians really shouldn't use spam--you get mad at the people who send you "Enlarge your member" ads, but think about what happens if you get that mad at the politician who's asking you to vote for him/her. That makes me wonder about people like Myrick who are sending out a targeted ad per week--counterproductive much?
Compare and contrast: CBS, New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, Al-Jazari... take your pick. Do you see unbiased news on these outlets?
The only problem that I see is that the Internet speeds up the trend that more and more people can find whatever isolated niche they like, where they won't have to be bothered by the uncomfortable reality that others don't think they way they do.
Don't worry, I think most politicians already send your emails straight to the bit bucket.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I gave a speech in Providence this week arguing that smart mobs are also the key to homeland security, drawing an analogy to Paul Revere (the original "weak link" in the Granovetter sense of the term -- member of 5 of the 7 Mass. groups involved in planning for independence) and the Minutemen: linking independent groups, redundant in case of problems, planned in advance, and flexible.
I said that wireless technologies, especially several mesh network variations, SMS texting and camera phones, plus the science of networking made the 2lst century version of the Minutemen possible
I also said -- and I think this is a critical distinction that the Department of Homeland Security just doesn't understand -- that a smart mob strategy could capitalize on the public's massive investment in the latest cell phones, wi-fi laptops and PDAs, allowing a lot more bang for the buck