This past week we witnessed
the inauguration of George W. Bush the 43rd president of the United
States. Whether you're a Democrat in mourning or a Republican in glee, the
results from Election Day should not obscure an important shift in America's
civic life. New tools and practices born on the Internet have reached critical
mass, enabling ordinary people to participate in processes that used to be
closed to them. It may seem like cold comfort for Kerry supporters now, but the
truth is that voters don't have to rely on elected or self-appointed leaders to
chart the way forward anymore. The era of top-down politics – where campaigns,
institutions and journalism were cloistered communities powered by hard-to-amass
capital – is over. Something wilder, more engaging and infinitely more
satisfying to individual participants is arising alongside the old order.
https://www.lynxtrack.com/signup.php
One moment when this new power
began to be collectively understood by grassroots activists was April 2003.
Mathew Gross, then toiling in obscurity on Howard Dean's presidential campaign,
posted the following on the message board of
SmirkingChimp.com,
a little-known but heavily trafficked forum for anti-Bush sentiment:
“So I wander
back to my desk and there really IS a note on my chair from Joe Trippi, the
Campaign Manager for Howard Dean. The note says:
Matt,
Start an "Ask the Dean
Campaign" thread over at the Smirking Chimp.
– Joe
Surely a
seminal moment in Presidential politics, no?
So, here's the
deal. Use this space to throw questions and comments our way. I'll be
checking this thread; Joe will be checking this thread. We're understandably
very busy so don't give up if we disappear for a day or two. Talk amongst
yourselves while we're out of the room, as it were. But we will check in and
try to answer questions. We want to hear from you. We want to know what you
think.
So, go to it. And thanks for supporting Howard Dean.”
Ultimately, more than 400
people posted comments on Gross' thread. Never before had anyone seen campaign
directors, managers and leaders directly interacting with the common voter for
more than a photo shoot. This was the first time the top-down world of
presidential campaigning had been opened to a bottom-up, laterally networked
community of ordinary voters. The Smirking Chimp is a web site with 25,000-plus
registered members, founded after the 2000 election. There are multiple
communities like this for, example:
DailyKos,
MyDD,
Eschaton,
Democratic Underground
and
Buzzflash are the
democratic non-insider communities deeply affecting the insiders. The Republican
part has begun to catch the wave with similar sites, like RedState.org. Indeed,
at most political organizations, "membership" and "participation" mean little
more than writing a check in response to a direct-mail appeal. All of a sudden
as a result of blogs, web site posts and instant chat programs participation has
been changed forever. Not since the first half of the 1900s have tens of
millions of Americans engaged in cross-class fellowship and civic activism. In
the early 1900’s participation took the form of membership in organizations like
the Free Masons, the Knights of Pythias and the American Legion. It has been a
long time since politicians truly wanted to talk to the proverbial “common man.”
The insiders and the power of
these insiders have come under constant attack especially from sites like
WorldChanging.com, a blog devoted to fostering this movement. New web-based
tools are facilitating a different way of doing politics, one in which we may
all, actually not hypothetically, be equals; where transparency and
accountability are more than slogans; and where anyone with few resources but a
compelling message can be a community organizer, an ad-maker, a reporter, a
publisher, a theorist, a money-raiser or a leader.
Consider the following:
• About two-thirds of
American adults use the internet, and more than 55 percent have access to a
high-speed internet connection at either home or work.
• More than 53 million people
have contributed material online, according to a spring 2003 survey by the Pew
Internet & American Life Project.
• More than 15 million have
their own web site.
• A new blog, or online
journal, is created every 5.3 seconds, according to
Technorati.com, a
site that tracks the known universe of these easily updated web sites. As of
Jan. 1, there were almost 5.3 million blogs, a million more than three months
before. More than half of them are regularly updated by their creators, which
produce more than 400,000 fresh postings every day.
• Of the approximately
400,000-500,000 people who attended a political meeting through the
social-networking site Meetup.com this election season, over half had never gone
to a political meeting before. 60 percent were under the age of 40.
• Attendees of Meetups for
Democratic Party presidential candidates reported making an average of $312 in
political contributions last year.
• A two-minute political
cartoon lampooning both Kerry and Bush, put out by
JibJab.com this
past summer, had 10 million viewings in the month of July – three times the
number of hits on both presidential campaign web sites combined – and has since
been viewed another 57 million times.
But it isn't the quantity of
interactions taking place that suggests the change under way; it is the quality
of those conversations. If, as a
New Yorker
cartoon put it, "On the Internet, no one knows if you're a dog," on the
Internet, no one likes it if you don't speak in a genuine human voice.
One of the first major sites
to begin to provide information to the average voter is
MoveOn.org, the
big, liberal e-mail activist group. However it is a drastically different
community than a site like
DailyKos.com, the
biggest of the new blog-centered sites. MoveOn is still very much a top-down
organization. Wes Boyd, Joan Blades, Eli Pariser and the other members of its
leadership team may sign all their mass e-mails with their first names, but they
set policy for the organization in much the same way as every other nonprofit,
by talking amongst themselves, fielding proposals from various suitors, polling
their audience and talking amongst themselves some more. Periodically they will
ask subscribers to offer their ideas about priorities using an "ActionForum"
program that enables visitors to suggest an issue, read what others have said
and vote on their preferences. But that tool gives MoveOn members little ability
to talk to each other directly or to aggregate their ideas independently of the
choices its leaders make for them.
By comparison, DailyKos is a
multilayered community engineered to reward ideas that bubble up from below.
Like many bloggers, Markos Moulitsas, the Gulf War veteran who runs it, requires
visitors to register (for free) if they want to post a comment. He also
encourages users to set up their own "diaries," or blogs within his blog, where
they can post their own entries. Unlike most blogs, the DailyKos is built on a
tool called Scoop, which includes peer moderation, where members rank each
other's entries and comments. Smart diary postings thus often rise to
Moulitsas's attention, and if he reprints them on his main page they gain an
even larger audience.
The new political technology
works because it gives individuals a way to pool their time, attention and
resources around causes they may hold in common – and to do it without needing
to become a professional activist or wait for approval from any authority
figure.
An amazing statistic for
advertisers and fundraisers is that a $2,000 budget from a small town democratic
congressional candidate to advertise on blogs for his campaign resulted a few
weeks later into more than $80,000 in small contributions to Democratic
congressional candidate Ben Chandler. Chandler went on to win the special
election for the 6th District in Kentucky. Suddenly politicians were adding
community-building tools to their web sites and buying ads on popular blogs.
Open-source politics is still
a long way off. The term "open source" specifically refers to allowing any
software developer to see the underlying source code of a program, so that
anyone can analyze it and improve it; better code trumps bad code, and
programmers who have proven their smarts have greater credibility and status.
Applied to political organizing, open source would mean opening up participation
in planning and implementation to the community, letting competing actors
evaluate the value of your plans and actions, being able to shift resources away
from bad plans and bad planners and toward better ones, and expecting more of
participants in return. It would mean moving away from egocentric organizations
and toward network-centric organizing.
To the visionary technologists
building the new civic software, we are living in nothing short of a paradigm
shift. There's no question that public discourse is being radically changed.
According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project's most recent survey,
Hispanics have closed the gap with whites, with two-thirds of both groups going
online, but Internet usage among blacks lags by about 18 percent. Age is the
other obvious predictor of online behavior, with just under one-quarter of
people over 65 venturing online. Yet another factor also affects Internet
participation: time. Most people who have time online work at desk jobs. If you
work as a dental hygienist or as a construction worker you just don’t have time
to be online.
These are likely to be
momentary bumps in a much larger wave. That's because the next generation is
growing up online, rather than adapting to it in their mid-adult years. More
than 2 million children aged 6-17 have their own website, according to a
December 2003 survey by Grunwald Associates. Twenty-nine percent of kids in
grades K-3 have their own e-mail address. Social networking sites like
Friendster and Flickr (a photo-sharing site) are drawing millions of
participants and fostering new kinds of social conversations, some of which are
already political.
In high schools across America
students are rating their teachers. I discovered
RateMyTeachers.com,
where more than 6 million ratings have been posted by students on more than
900,000 teachers at more than 40,000 American and Canadian middle and high
schools. This is covering about 85 percent of all the schools in both countries.
Just
imagine when they take that habit into their adult lives, and start rating other
authority figures, like politicians and bosses. The future is in their hands,
though the rest of us will be taken along for the ride.
Perhaps
the lesson direct marketers and Internet marketers can learn from this is to
provide our clients with interactive areas to express their opinion, and feel
not only like the recipient of marketing but also a part of the process. For
example Mars inc. recently had its customers choose the color of the next M&M.
This process created a steady base of Internet candy lovers where Mars could
capitalize on its onsite advertising. As the Internet has become a place to gain
easy access to information it must also become a place for the consumer to gain
a voice in the marketing it is receiving. Allowing the consumer to interact with
advertising and marketing will only increase the overall performance of our
campaigns. The Internet is still evolving and Internet advertising is still very
young, hopefully the next year will bring growth maturity and success to all of
us.
David Fishman
dfishman@wrpmedia.com
