I’m now at one of the afternoon panels, which has the rather bland title of “Parties, Elections and Campaigning II.” But the papers look rather enticing:
–Daniel Kreiss on “Taking Our Country Back: The New Left, Yippies, Deaniacs, and the Production of Contemporary American Politics.”
–G.R. Boynton on “Political Leadership in the Web 2.0 world.”
–Giovanni Navarria on “Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, the Downing Street e-petitions road tax battle, and Beppegrillo.it: A comparative study.”
Kreiss leads off. The focus of his talk is to show the cultural antecedents of the Dean campaign in the old New Left and Yippie movements of the 1960s in America. I’ve read his paper on the plane over, and he has put his finger on some important connections.
He starts with “What was the Dean campaign?” explaining the origins of the Vermonter’s insurgent effort in 2003-04. He notes that many web theorists have tended to read the campaign as the embodiment of peer-to-peer anti-hierarchical politics. The guiding metaphor, he notes, started with Joe Trippi’s invocation of “open source politics.” In one sense, Kreiss argues, this view is correct. There was a lot of hype about Dean and the internet, deliberately so. At the same time, Kreiss acknowledges, a number of new tools for fundraising, mobilization and messaging came out thru the Dean campaign that were indeed innovative.
But, he notes, most observers have failed to understand how the campaign benefited from the particular moment that it was embedded in (i.e. the post-crash environment in Silicon Valley, which put a number of techies in play, looking for meaningful work), neither do they explain why this worked for Dean and not for other candidates.
So, he turns to reading technology culturally, and argues that we need to analyze the larger “macro-discursive” context, the “articulated meaning of technologies,” and its incorporation into local contexts. Uh, oh, Daniel, you’re losing me.
Wait, now he’s talking about how the early New Left notion of “participatory democracy,” popularized in the Students for a Democratic Society “Port Huron Statement,” became a kind of master template for all kinds of social movements by the late 1960s.
How did these ideas help the Dean campaign? He argues that Trippi specifically worked to blend the Internet culture with the counter-cultural themes of the 1960s. Well, yes. It’s been well documented now, by Fred Turner in particular in his book “From Counterculture to Cyberculture,” that a branch of the 1960s counter-culture moved directly into early do-it-yourself computer hacker community. Trippi didn’t come up with this blending on his own but was building on themes that were already available. (Apparently Turner is Kreiss’s adviser at Stanford.)
Now Kreiss is talking about how Wired covered the Dean campaign, and how some people from the tech arena, like Howard Rheingold and David Weinberger, found themselves on the Dean bandwagon. Likewise, he just mentioned the “co-location” of the Digital Democracy Teach-in and the 2004 ETech conference, as another conjunction of importance. However, he’s not explaining how A led to B or vice versa or what it means that these things happened near or with each other. Frustrating. I’m not sure these epiphenomena mean much (and I saw that with full respect to my friends Howard and David), or at least Kreiss hasn’t explained why the conjunction is important.
OK, we’re getting to the closing part of Kreiss’s talk. He’s looking at how the professional field of electoral politics has changed post-Dean. “Dean offered a symbolic prototype of a new campaign,” and thus the social status of similarly positioned actors rose. Um, could it be that their social status rose because campaigns decided that they needed more internet organizing skills because it helped them win their battles?
Now he’s talking about new stakeholder forums where practitioners get together to hash out what they’re doing. He’s talking about PDF, but not mentioning it here in his talk, even though he’s got three pages on us in his draft paper.
I can’t tell what Kreiss’s argument really is. Is there a pony in here somewhere? He’s got a slide up about “normative implications” and seems to be arguing that we’re undermining the role of the state and other institutions like media, without fleshing out a rich theory of democratic participation. If I get him right, we’re advocating that “networks of affinity” with get equated with democratic publics, when they’re a thinner form of participation.
Gee, why don’t you come out and say what you mean? No wonder I am not an academic. Still, Kreiss is swimming in the same waters with us, even if he isn’t ready to get wet.
Now we’re listening to G.R. Boynton of the University of Iowa, presenting on “Political leadership in the Web 2.0 world.” His focus is on what John Kerry did after he lost the election.
What did Kerry do? Boynton reports that after returning to the U.S. Senate, he reconstituted the JohnKerry.com community. Five months after the election he sent an email to his list, asking them to support a petition opposing the so-called “nuclear option” for pushing nominees thru the US Senate. A few days later, he reported back to his list: nearly 250,000 people had signed on and helped fund an ad in USA Today. A week later, he did it again, this time the issue being easing regulations for families of military personnel. The issue passed in part to emails his list had sent with stories of why the changes were needed. Two weeks later, a KidsFirst petition was the cause. Kerry’s most recent call was just a few weeks ago. So JohnKerry.com continues, and Boynton wants to describe this as a story of leadership.
What are forms of leadership? There is official roles, by the powers vested in me. A second is the charismatic role, and how followers feel about a leader. A third kind is representation, elect me and I will act for you. Kerry’s role is sort of new: he called people into action, aggregated their voices, reported back to them and repeated the process over and over.
Over three years, there have been 133 communications from John Kerry to his list. The peak was during the months around the November 2006 election. Each communication has included a task at hand, an enemy or obstacle in the way, and the call to the community (along with the report back).
[Uh-oh, my mind has wandered and I just had an epiphany: I am waiting to hear a human voice amid all this academic distance and opaqueness. This is more than a small irony. This is a conference about the internet and politics, and the “strange attractor”–politics as a conversation–seems almost entirely boiled out of the presentations. I mean no office to the folks here, but their academic training seems painfully out of synch with their topic!]
Back to Kerry’s “leadership.” Top agenda items in those 133 emails: Iraq, environment, health care, Supreme Court justices, and economic issues. Slow down, I have to get the numbers for you. [Just kidding.]
Where is the 2.0 in this story? Where is the “architecture of participation…that creates network effects”? Boynton says the architecture of participation in the JohnKerry.com community was in the calls to action, the responses, the money raised and the stories highlighted. The network effects was in the $16.5 million raised by the list for candidates. [I am chafing as I write this. Where is the community in a list?]
This is very unusual behavior for a politician, Boynton notes, saying that it differed dramatically from other national Democrats or elected officials during this period. Second, it was only possible to new technology and people’s comfort with responding to emails and giving online.
[Sigh. How can you study John Kerry’s use of the internet post-2004 and not say a word about his 2008 presidential ambitions? And how can you call a list a community? And how unusual is it for a politician to keep mining a mailing list for support?]
Our last speaker is up: Giovanni Navarria on “Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, the Downing Street e-petitions road tax battle, and Beppegrillo.it: A comparative study.” If this isn’t the shit, I don’t know what will be. At least it’s a really promising title.
Navarria has a thick Italian accent, so usual warnings about lousy transcription and paraphrasing are doubly true.
First, some background on Beppe Grillo. He’s not a politician, but a well-known Italian comedian, from the 1970s and 1980s television. He stepped on the foot of a powerful politician and he was out. (Accusing the ruling Socialists of being crooks while being on primetime in front of 20 million people: reminder to self, not a good career move.)
In 2005, Grillo’s site launched as a blog, with some inspiration from Dean and MoveOn.org, but a much more anti-political slant. The site, he notes, is fully Web 2.0 compliant, with audio, video, event-organizing, etc. The kind of information on the site is non-aligned. A typical post by Grillo gets 1200-1500 comments. That is very impressive by any measure.
A recent campaign was called “Clean Up the Parliament.” The idea was to raise money to buy full page ads in the newspapers to publicize the fact that about two dozen members of Parliament had been convicted by the court and should resign. This started in 2005, based on input from users. They raised 60,000 euros to buy one ad in the International Herald Tribune. All the other national papers in Italy refused to run the ad! (Among the politicians to be listed in the ad were Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister and media mogul who makes Rupert Murdoch look like Arthur Sulzberger.)
The next phase of the campaign was an effort to push Berlusconi from power. A new government then came to power but it didn’t institute any meaningful anticorruption reforms. No conflict of interest rules, for example. So in 2007, another campaign was launched by Grillo to push a proposed law preventing candidates with convictions on their record from running for office, and to limit them to two terms. Members of parliament were also to be chosen directly, rather than by the parties. [I want to meet this guy, Grillo!]
This campaign only used internet-based tools. No advertising on TV or newspapers, just word of mouth. On the rally day, more than 350,000 people came together in giant rallies supporting the campaign. The BBC and the New York Times covered it, but the Italian mainstream media called it useless and anti-political. Perhaps, but turnout was surprisingly down in recent Italian municipal elections, and the press is speculating the drop was due to Grillo’s movement and his call on Italians to sit out the vote. A few candidates also ran for office pledging support for Grillo’s platform. One who ran in Rome using the internet as her sole organizing vehicle and got 45,000 votes, 3% of the overall vote in the city.
The Beppe Grillo blog is clearly the nexus of antipolitics in Italy, and I mean that in a good sense. Unlike MoveOn, which is closely aligned with the Democratic party, Grillo is reinforcing outsider politics. Which makes sense in the Italian context of widespread political corruption. I want to learn more about his movement and their use of the web.
Unfortunately, Navarria has to conclude before getting further into the comparisons to the Dean or Downing Street examples. I’ll have to get my hands on his paper. Hopefully it’s in English!
Time for Q&A:
-These may all be exciting counter-hegemonic tools, in terms of voter mobilization or fundraising, but the Right is still dominant (ex. Old media demolished Dean, the Swift Boats killed off Kerry). This questioner thinks that McCain will be our next president. How is Web 2.0 really changing the balance of power?
-Kreiss replies, Your question goes to the heart of “does this work?” You can’t look at these tools apart from the context they are used in. The Obama campaign is using a similar package of tools, but in a different way. I was a precinct campaign for Obama in CA, and saw the extent to which they work on a classic organizing model, giving you a precinct walk list, etc. Very much borrowing from the Republicans’ techniques in 2004 in places like Ohio. He also points out how the campaigns are sharing tasks, but not necessarily involving voters in policy decisions.
-Boynton: The presumption of your question is that there is a “works.” He talks about other uses of 2.0 tech in relation to other things than the presidential question.
-Navarria: The candidate he referred to who got 3% was completely subverting the traditional media. To do that well was a success, given the context, where Berlusconi owns most of the TV stations and you couldn’t possibly buy an ad saying he was a crook and get it aired.
-To Kreiss: Perhaps the internet isn’t undermining institutions, but reforming them. Voting participation is up in the US, for example. Second question, what about the fact that Trippi’s rhetoric and practice didn’t match–he talked a good internet game but spent most of his money on TV ads.
-Kreiss: You’re 100% right. The Dean campaign didn’t have structures to foster community debate, for example. With regards to the internet’s impact, he argues that the 2.0 rhetoric is very oppositional towards institutions, talking about “leveling” for example.
-I ask Kreiss whether he thinks technology inherently benefits the left, and if so, why did the Bush-Cheney campaign make a better use of power-to-the-edge theory in their 2004 field operations?
-He answers that the early Web 1.0 luminaries like Newt Gingrich and Esther Dyson saw real potential in decentralizing government. He also points to how successful Ron Paul was in this cycle. He doesn’t know why other Rs haven’t been as successful. Then he also notes that talk-radio is very participatory, in that hosts take calls from the audience. The principles underlying the technologies being discussed here are not inherently left or right, but his focus is on the cultural appropriation of the “web 2.0” veneer.
-Boynton says the real hero of 2.0 in this cycle is Ron Paul, pointing out that there are well over 100,000 video clips tagged with his name on YouTube. The point is that this is small group-based, that they now have a voice in the process. Indeed.
After the panel broke up I had a chance to talk with Kreiss, who it turns out I know slightly from his non-academic work with VoterWatch.org. (I knew his name sounded familiar.) I pushed him to state more clearly what he thought about all the things he was describing, and he clearly has some strong concepts. But he admitted that he is still working thru his ideas and wasn’t quite ready for broad declarative statements. Still, clearly he’s a voice to watch.
April 17, 2008