Web 2.0 gives birth to Politics 2.0
Here is a great post on the evolution of Politics 2.0 By Drew Clark
When it comes to adapting information technology, Washington is always about two years behind the rest of the country. So it makes sense that, finally, Web 2.0 is catching hold and gathering momentum here, in early 2007.
Washington’s political operative and consulting class has been energized by the early start to the 2008 election. And no one is ignoring the Web this campaign cycle. Call it Politics 2.0, and watch how it changes the media power balance when it comes to political discourse.
Consider YouTube’s YouChoose ’08, which last month launched its online channels for presidential candidates – and has 13 of them in a fortnight. Yahoo’s presidential election site is attempting to build community around Flickr photo-shoots of candidates on the stump. MySpace is likely to start a presidential space of its own.
Sure, every major candidate has paid lip service to glories of the Internet since 1996. Bill Clinton invoked the “information super-highway” and connecting classrooms to the Internet. Bob Dole clumsily mangled his campaign’s Web address during a presidential debate.
That was all window-dressing. Their teams – and their successors’ teams’ in 2000 and 2004 – mostly hired a few geeks to play politics on computers. The real campaigning went on in the broadcast television networks and in the pages of The New York Times and Washington Post.
That’s about to change. There is an energy about electoral politics and the Internet that is different this time around. Almost all of it has to do with maturation of software and social networking models that could upset the pre-ordained dance between candidates, media and voters. Already, we’ve seen John Edwards make YouTube a big part of his campaign, with others close behind.
To put it in other words, can Web 2.0 in 2008 truly displace the “MSM” as the premier medium of political discourse? Can the blogosphere bring down the mass-market media stage?
It could. Or at least it might. So says Joe Trippi, former campaign manager to Howard Dean. Sure, Dean lost. But Chuck DeFeo, who was eCampaign Manager for Bush-Cheney ’04, agrees completely with Trippi’s analysis. Now he’s trying to harness conservative backlashers – the people who do “not believe that Dan Rather was reflecting” their views – to congregate at Salem Communications’ Townhall.com.
Trippi and DeFeo were only two of the geek-politicos that gathered last week for Politics Online, the annual conference of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University. Optimism about the Politics 2.0 was high.
Even NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen, who predicted that candidates would use Web 2.0 technologies as a “symbolic gesture” but “keep things exactly the same,” was bullish on blogs and wikis. They would do for citizen journalism what his previous calling – promoting “public journalism” in an (unsuccessful) effort to get the press to focus on election issues, and not the horse race – could never do.
Also represented at the conference were the creators of innovative sites like TechPresident and PresVid.com, or “the YouTube Campaign.” Online strategies herald new voter engagement that will “make politicians more accountable, creating a virtuous circle where elected officials who are… less top-down are rewarded with greater voter trust and support,” wrote TechPresident creators Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry.
But if Politics 2.0 benefits smart politicians and engaged voters, who loses from this new turn of affairs? The mainstream media!
Indeed, the most entertaining part of Politics Online came from a panel that pitted bloggers versus MSM: Rosen and Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine.com and PresVid against Jim Brady, executive editor of the washingtonpost.com, and David Plotz, deputy editor of Slate (now owned by the Washington Post).
Plotz said that Web traffic shows that horse race is what readers want – and don’t “want to eat their vegetables.”
“Journalists are convinced that no one wants ‘issues’ stories,” countered Rosen. “I don’t think that is going to change. The wild card is all the people excluded by the earlier process and all the things they can bring.”
If there’s a king-maker in Politics 2.0, it won’t be the likes of The New York Times or the CBS evening news.
By there may still be an opening. Consider an off-handed comment at the conference by Eliott Schrage, vice president of global communications for Google: “We have reached out to all the candidates and invited them to come to Google, to talk technology and policy, and maybe even grab lunch. And we are going to put those videos up if we can, and if the candidates permit us, on our web sites as well.”
Is it possible that the most consequential media pilgrimage a candidate makes in the 2008 election will be to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, rather than to the mid-town Manhattan news rooms of The Times or the CBS Evening News?
Lessig Launches Change Congress: Political Reform a la Creative Commons and Wikipedia
Here is a post from Andy Carvin on Politics 2.0….
Today at the National Press Club, Professor Lawrence Lessig launched the Change Congress project. Created in conjunction with Joe Trippi, the project intends to employ the strengths of the Internet to end the impact of PACs and lobbyists on congressional policymaking. What’s really fascinating about this initiative is that he’s taking the lessons learned from creating the Creative Commons copyright initiative and applying it to political reform in a way that’s never been done before.
In his speech, Lessig gave several examples of policy changes that should have taken place but didn’t because of the influence of money, such as combating global warming or limiting the recommended allotment of sugar in our diets. These are policies that should have been no-brainers, but industry influence upended the process. He noted that when the country’s forefathers talked about independence, it wasn’t just about independence from Britain, but independence from improper influence as well. In that sense, he argued, their goal of achieving independence has failed.
But Lessig thinks it’s still possible to remove this dependence between Congress and money once and for all. The Change Congress project will take a three-step approach to the issue.
First, he wants members of Congress and the public to go online and pledge their support for up to four different goals: no longer accepting money from lobbyists and PACs; banning earmarks; supporting public financing of campaigns; and achieving total transparency of how Congress works. Users will be able to do this in the same way you select a Creative Commons license for your website. Their website will have a form that lets you select which ones you support, and it’ll generate a code you can put on your own site. This code will contain metadata driven by the semantic Web – essentially, a collection of URLs, each defining which of the policy goals you support. (update, 4:20pm: when I wrote this paragraph, the site’s badge generator wasn’t up and running yet, but now that it is, it seems that the code generated for users doesn’t contain Semantic Web metadata yet. Update 4:37pm: I’m now told that Semantic Web metadata might be rolled into the badges very soon, possibly later this evening or tomorrow; a volunteer is working on the code and hopes they’ll use it. -ac)
Embedding this code into your website, whether you’re a policymaker, a candidate or a member of the public, will let them reach step number two: tracking who supports what. In the same way that search engines can pick up websites that employ different Creative Commons licenses, Change Congress will be able to pick up which sites support each of the four policy goals. They’ll then be able to map out where support is strongest and where it’s weakest. Then, they’ll deploy crowdsourcing, just like on Wikipedia, to get an army of volunteers delving into the details to see who’s just pledged support and who’s actually supporting the cause in measurable ways. This information, too, will be mapped for all to see and scrutinize.
Step number three will be to employ these tools for raising money. The public will be able to make small donations – even just five or 10 dollars – to candidates that share the same policy reform beliefs as they do. This will allow for grassroots fundraising to take place, not unlike Emily’s List or the Obama campaign. Taken all together, he describes his project as a “Silicon Valley approach” to policy reform.
Lessig admitted there will be naysayers, particularly those who feel there are other problems more important that reforming Congress and the flow of money. To them, he gave the example of the alcoholic. An alcoholic faces many problems – loss of family, employment, health, etc – but none of them can be solved until the underlying problem – dependence on alcohol – is addressed first. To Lessig, before we can solve all the major policy issues of our day, we must first eliminate Congress’ dependence on money and outside influence. Once this can be done, the real work of implementing important policy solutions can take place. Harnessing the power of the Web and its seemingly endless community of concerned citizens, he may just be on to something here.
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