Mobilizing Generation 3.0

Information access and communication.  And the analogy of a public space.

These main themes govern the conception of social networking according to Rigby, in his text Mobilizing Generation 2.0.  Combined, these themes suggest that a politician’s engagement with social networking needs to be, as if this couldn’t be guessed, interactive, content rich, and allow for unfettered communication among the participants of the network.

It’s damned important to elaborate these concepts in handbooks, but really only to the folks who don’t already grok social networking, blogs, virtual worlds, etc.  Rigby’s conclusion sums it up well: in his book, he helps you see

how many organizations and campaigns are attempting to navigate the intricacies of Web 2.0 technologies and the associated shifts in our cultural landscape.

If he’d waited a sec before publishing, perhaps he’d have gone bananas over my.barackobama.com.  Yup, there it is.  A brilliant tool for allowing people to get involved, track activity, organize each other, be organized, and so forth.  Somebody in Obama’s campaign understands the whole deal and implemented it well.  Sometimes they even give ringtones out for free!  And yet…

And yet it’s only part of the story.  He rejects the “If you build it, they will come” mentality.  The “Issue a press release!  Where?  On the blog!” mentality.  The “I’m the only one who can talk on this multi-nodal, multi-media, multi-lateral, multi-oriented communication medium!” mentality.  Goody, good, good.

But, what’s next?

Unfortunately, I can’t exactly elucidate an answer to that question quite just yet, but I do have a few ideas about where this whole discussion went wrong:

• Oh, those kids.  They say the darndest things.
• Campaigning is inherently conservative.
• The voters need an incentive…or so they say.

Ribgy first errs by being a bit too old.  Yes, he’s only, like, thirtysomething, but it’s not actually his age that’s at fault — it’s that he thinks he’s too old.  So, the vast majority of folks out there didn’t grow up to the ripe age of thirteen with the ability to T9 type.  Time to get over it.  The kiddies aren’t aliens who live in communication cyberworlds all the time.  They’re just doing what seems natural given the technologies they have access to and the desired results.

As such, the content and communication needs to match the constituency.  If all teens (for example) want to talk about is how cute the candidate’s sons and daughters are, release some photos!  Unfortunately, campaigns and the media that covers them are inherently conservative.  They won’t take risks, their version of jumping ship is changing a few lines in a speech.

And, lastly, enough with the ringtones and listen to your own advice: people are on the internet to do stuff they’re already doing.  Hobbies, sex, and wasting time.  If you can facilitate these things, you’ll be doing yourself and everybody else a favor.

 

Even more lastly, there will be a Web 3.0, and it will be driven by social forces, and it might not even be as huge a paradigm shift as we may, or may not, have already experienced.  The kiddies will think it’s a natural evolution and the campaigns will still be barely ankle deep.  It’s going to be fun.

On The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell

The way communications, both the words and the meanings of the words, get transmitted through the blogosphere demonstrates an interesting opportunity to apply and critique some of Gladwell’s hypotheses about social movements.  Let’s check some perspectives out:

Blog postings as “infection vectors.”  Since he chooses to use an analogy of epidemics so liberally, we might as well start there: blogs, if seen as discrete bodies, share quite a lot of bodily fluids.  It’s common enough, at this point, to see entire postings that are nothing but the citation of another blog, article or source.  And, with things like trackbacks, hit and traffic analysis, and comments, the paths that posts and stories use to inseminate, er, insinuate, rather, their way through the population is all the more obvious.  Blogs often even have a roll call of their most frequent partners.  It certainly suggests that Connectors might use their promiscuous exchanges to propagate a full-bore memetic infection.

The idea of Mavens as important to the transmission of ideas is apparent: even if small time blogger picks up an interesting story (who shared the Kilkenny letter first?), the “a-list” blogs will catch the bug real fast and spread the little guy around in a big way.

But all this is fairly rote.  The idea that internet politics are somehow different because they are a “one to many” communication medium, because they reduce the cost of entry for an individual to participate in the forum, because they provide fairly easy modes of information retrieval, etc., is old news.  Allow me to take a skeptic’s approach for just one moment.

This is politics we’re talking about.  Dirty, slime wielding, partisan hackery that, despite anybody’s best efforts, will spread like the plague.  The blogs can stir up a ruckus, yes, but in what way do these ruckii actually reflect meaningful information exchange?  How do we measure it?  If McCain addresses a blog comment in a national address, have we hit the big time, woah, hold-onto-your-hats tipping point?  If O’Reilly lashes out at the Huffington Post, thereby propagating the infection further, are we past the brink and in free-fall?

I’d suggest that much of the bloviation coming from the blogs is meaningful in that it can create the buzz that Gladwell prizes so highly, and the organs of propagation — a-list blogs, mainstream media articles, and so on — offer an intriguing path for exploration.  Yet, what I’d really like to follow, however, is a mixture of Levitt-Gladwell-Miller to round out the internet part of internet politics.  What actually makes a story happen, and how does it get used, and why do people willfully share it?  It’d never happen, especially since Spooky is way to spacey to get too involved, but one can always dream.

jonathan lethem, “the ecstacy of influence” from, “sound unbound”

Jonathan Lethem’s essay in DJ Spooky’s anthology “Sound Unbound.” Originally from Harper’s.

A few notes, first regarding collage:

Visual, sound, and text collage–which for many centuries were relatively fugitive traditions (a cento here, a folk pastiche there)–became explosively central to a series of movements in the twentieth century: futurism, cubism, Dada, musique concrete, situationism, pop art, and appropriationism. In fact, collage, the common denominator in that list, might be called the art form of the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first. …it becomes apparent that the appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sin qua non of the creative act, cutting across all forms and genres in the realm of cultural production. (28-29)

digital palimpsest, layering interpretations over an other’s voice

Uwemedimo and Oppenheimer, “History and Histrionics: Vision Machine’s Digital Poetics, in “Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema”

The gist: Vision Machine’s project took an archival speech with no audio and then asked a deaf person to read the lips of the speaker over the course of numerous playings of the video.

The tool: The readings of the lip reader were layered such that they would overlap.  Sometimes, they would echo each other, sometimes they would revise each other, sometimes they would be isolated.

Palimpsest refers to the reusable papyrus where previous writings were not completely erased before a second use.

The authors try to distinguish digital technologies’ mode of layering from analog’s montage/collage.  Not sure if this has any traction.

NM&PD, paper 3, theory

The previously described video collages provide copious amounts of reflection and critique of the dominant voices within political discourse, but the manner and function the objects influence this discourse is still unknown. While presumed to be dissident, understanding the videos as sites of empowerment will establish their existence and meaning in opposition to the hegemonic structure of political discourse. The arrival at this understanding will require an exploration of both the attributes of the videos and their medium, as well as an exploration of the actual effect the videos have within the discourse.

Before exploring the video collages as sites of empowerment, however, a review of the objects’ attributes is in order to once again establish them as sites of potential voice. In particular, the videos’ digital, mutable, and fluid characteristics permit their use in a critical idiom, the same idiom which could be potentially be used in opposition to the hegemonic forces at play within political discourse. Since the video collages are created from found material, there needs to exist a library from which an appropriate lexicon might be derived. Such a library can only be made practical with the benefits afforded by digital technology, such as the ability to capture, replicate, transfer, and distribute content as needed, as often as possible. The internet-based media environment takes these attributes to an extreme by providing myriad opportunities to procure existing material for later repurposing in a video collage. For example, as of the 2008 presidential campaigns, it is common practice to release videos of candidates making all manner of speeches and statements online. The videos of these speeches are in a format that is easily captured by a computer, mixed with other digital objects such as music and other videos, and then distributed online once again.

to pursue…

Landow, p. 328.  He and Aarseth agree with Foucault: “authorship” is a social category, not a technological one.  I think I agree, too, but I’m making the opposite argument right now in a stupid paper.

silent farts

‘When the great lord passes by, the wise peasant bows deeply and silently farts.’  J. C. Scott, 1990.

the beginnings of why satire doesn’t work

I initially thought satire would be my entry into the rhetorical mode the videos used to comment on “political discourse” (whatever that is…), but have since moved away from it.

My understanding of satire puts it as an umbrella term around all of the rhetorical modes used to point out the folly of something by advocating the opposite.  But the actual advocating is done by more specific devices, like irony, parody, and appropriation.  The actual devices lend themselves to postmodern interpretation a lot better than general satire, so I went after that pretty quickly.  Linda Hutcheon’s been pretty solid.  She focuses mostly on parody as the mode/device used by postmodernism, but I think irony is really the place to go.

But, that’s getting ahead of myself: most of the books I found about satire focused on it as a historically based rhetorical form that got its modern flavor from Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, aka totally 18th century, modernist stuff.  Which isn’t to say that we don’t use satire today, or that its use is outdated (I think fake news a la The Onion and The Daily Show/Colbert Report are modern examples), but that the modernist dialectic is unavoidable when you talk about satire.  If Critical Reintroduction says differently, I might have to reconsider that position, though.

I just grabbed a few of the (overdue) library books scattered on my floor and flipped through them to see if anything supports my position.  Rosenblum, in “The Satirist’s Art” (1972):

“If satire’s reflexiveness, its concern with its own form, makes it seem like a genre congenial to modern taste, the rhetorical view of satire makes it seem old-fashioned in that it runs counter to a view of the relation of poetry to the real world that has become orthodox in many influential poetics. …….. The satirist is interested in his work primarily for its power to move his audience; no matter how inventive the personae or ingenious the metaphors, these literary devices exist only the persuade the audience.”  (p. 31)

This didn’t really serve my purpose super well because I don’t see my videos as in direct opposition to the dominant paradigm.

NM&PD, second paper, about the media

Previously, I discussed how the multiplication of voices afforded by digital technologies has expanded contemporary political discourse beyond its traditional hegemonic power structure by including to a greater degree a number of backstage dialogs that are inherently subversive to the existing power structure. The dialogs utilize a number of rhetorical tools, such as appropriation, adaptation, and inference, in order to fly under the radar of the dominant forces within the discourse while remaining especially potent and rich to their intended participants. Bridging the chasm between political and popular discourses and using these tools to make the meaning of each enriched by the other establishes a new idiom of critique that serves to deepen the involvement of heretofore poorly represented groups within the national political discourse.

Suggesting that digital technologies and online environments are “democratizing” political discourse within the United States, or that the participants in these new dialogs upend the power structure so far as to redefine the political process might be overstating the state of affairs. But, that the new levels of discourse that are taking place in these spaces are fundamentally questioning a number of established aspects of the political process and the way it reaches the population at large. In particular, certain types of video collages exist as intertextual discursive objects, substantively questioning power structures, imparting and appropriating meaning, and establishing a novel kind of political voice within the discourse as a whole. The three primary modes of this action are: the technology and techniques used to create the collages, in essence, their form; the potency of appropriation, especially as it pertains to voice, identity, and meaning; and the the subsequent question of authorship. Combined, these three modes of action act subversively within the discourse and serve to challenge the dominant power structures.

NM&PD, first paper, all ’bout dissent

The internet is a new space for the enactment of civil participation on a vast, unprecedented scale. The array of participatory technologies available to an average user is constantly added to; the list now includes: blogs, forums, chat rooms, comment sections, among others. The proliferation of these technologies has impacted the world of politics in significant, undeniable ways, both through an increasing engagement with the political process, evident in the amount of donations candidates are receiving from online sources¹, and an increasing amount of influence on the content and direction of political discourse both on- and off-line. One of the most potent impacts increasing online civil participation has been the multiplication of “voices” on the internet. The new online spaces have created new venues for these voices to express their dissent or consent, but it is the interactions of these voices, the ways they weave their meanings through each other and around each other, that concerns this analysis.

“Political discourse,” viewed as a system of political voices in dialog with each other, is characterized by a variety of types of communications, communicators, and modes of communication. In part, using the term avoids differentiation between the types of voices in play within the discourse, but that differentiation is vital to an analysis that emphasizes the use of power and authority that characterizes the interactions of different political voices within the discourse en bloc. Specifically, the systems of power in play within the discourse privilege certain voices over others.² This aspect of political discourse is placed in jeopardy when faced with the participatory attributes of the internet.