Archive: Year: 2010

Two weeks ago, I wrote a post here looking at the sudden flowering of online protest against the Transportation Safety Administration's new "enhanced" pat-down searches, and asked whether it was possible that real on-the-ground civil disobedience was about to break out at airport security lines. I also answered my question with the obvious prediction that it wasn't: It would appear that the moment is ripe for public dismay to turn into collective action. But can a very loose knit network of websites coalesce into effective action without clear leadership? A few of the new sites have names attached to them, but not all do. And joining a Facebook group in support of the November 24 "opt-out" or "do not fly"...

Photo credit: "Sunset Over Santiago" by Deanna Zandt These are my notes on the first PdF Latin America conference that just finished last week in Santiago, Chile: Latin America is a hotbed of efforts to watchdog government using the internet. Politicians and political operatives clearly "get" the lingo of networked politics, and have drunk the social media kool-aid, though it's hardly clear that they're listening to their constituents any more than talking at them using digital tools (why doesn't this surprise me?). The hacking of civil society by we-government activists is just starting to flower. And the United States is viewed with mixed feelings by our friends to the South--a source of democratic inspiration and political consternation. I'm somewhat hesitant to...

Is America on the verge of an airport travelers rebellion against the Transportation Safety Agency (TSA)? In the last few days, there's been a rapid flowering of angry first-person tales from pissed-off travelers, some populist agitating by high-profile bloggers like Jeffrey Goldberg and James Fallows, sites like WeWontFly.com, StopGropingMe.com and FlyWithDignity.org sprouting, and a call to an Alinsky-style protest on November 24th, when passengers are being urged to "opt-out" of the TSA's new "naked-scanner" screening technology for the more time-consuming and embarrassing full-body pat-down now being enforced--which itself is generating lots of traveler anger. In other words, we just might be on the verge of a real-time test of Malcolm Gladwell's thesis, that weak ties formed on the internet can't sustain...

Our friends at Facebook have been getting lots of mileage of their report, noted here yesterday by Nancy, that in 98 House races and and 19 Senate contests, the candidate with the most Facebook "likes" won their race, respectively, 74% and 81% of the time. Like us, the LATimes blog was skeptical that Facebook numbers truly meant that much, noting how in several high profile races, the candidates with the most fans lost. But other observers, including Wired's David Kravets ("Analysis: Bigger Twitter, Facebook Flock Boosts Election Odds"); Bloomberg's Brian Womack ("Facebook Users Help Predict Republican Election-Night Victories"); and Venturebeat's Matthew Lyney ("Facebook, Twitter analytics successfully predict 2010 election winners") parroted Facebook's spin. Now some smart academic observers are turning their attention...

Marshall Ganz, the man who devised Barack Obama's grassroots organizing model in 2008, and a master community organizer, has an eloquent statement in the LA Times on what went wrong for Obama between 2008 and 2010. His main points are that Obama went from being a "transformational" candidate to being a "transactional" president, and that he also demobilized his movement and in effect unilaterally disarmed in the face of robust Republican opposition. Here's the gist: "Transformational" leadership engages followers in the risky and often exhilarating work of changing the world, work that often changes the activists themselves. Its sources are shared values that become wellsprings of the courage, creativity and hope needed to open new pathways to success. "Transactional" leadership, on...

The most interesting times in American politics are the transitions. Between Election Day and the seating of a new Congress, things sometimes get shaken up. The rising party usually has some changes it actually wants to make, and some promises it actually wants to keep to its base. And the declining party often also makes changes; leadership gets re-arranged and there's usually a desire to show the voters that "we heard you, too." Consider that in 2006, the mid-term election that swept the Republicans out of power in the House, the newly empowered House Democrats actually instituted some improvements in ethics rules and took steps--sometimes with the support of House Republicans--to open up that chamber to the new world of social...

Wired.com just posted my review of Nick Bilton's new book, "I Live in the Future and Here's How it Works." Bilton, the New York Times lead technology blogger, is a friend, but as you'll see, I have a few friendly criticisms of his work. Sometime in the coming weeks, I'll have an interview with him here on techPresident, discussing these questions. I am not a technochondriac, Nick Bilton’s wonderful word for the naysayers and worrywarts who think that our texting-obsessed kids will never read another book and that online social networking is destroying the bonds that hold real communities together. I love our brave new gadget-filled hyper-connected world. And I loved reading Bilton’s romp through the fear-filled fields of the past, when...

For my money, the coolest real-time site to watch today isn't the Facebook voting tracker or even the Foursquare election check-ins. It's Trendsmap.com's view of the #IVoted hashtag as people check in across the country. Here's the view as of 11:19am this morning, with the states east of the Mississippi dominating current voting: You can zoom in on the map; if you do, you'll quickly see that Washington DC is rife with people announcing that they're voting. Other cities, not so much....

The Wall Street Journal published an essay by me this weekend in their Review section, where I try to look at the big picture of what internet-powered mass participation is doing to politics and governance in America. And it's kind of nice to see some of the points I was trying to make echoed by none other than Jon Stewart in the closing remarks that he made at the end of his semi-satirical Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington on Saturday. Here's Stewart: The country's 24-hour, political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems, but its existence makes solving them that much harder. The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus,...

10Questions is a project of Personal Democracy Forum We're entering the final stretch of 10Questions.com, where the public gets to evaluate the answers posted by participating candidates and vote on whether they've actually answered the question. Arguably, this is the most powerful piece of 10Questions, because we're creating a transparent feed-back loop. All too often, candidates for elective office dodge answering questions from reporters and the general public. That's politics in a scarcity-of-media environment. You have to stay "on-message" and speak in sound-bites if the only avenue you have of reaching the public is broadcast media, where air-time is scarce. And when candidates avoid answering the question, the public usually lacks any way of changing their behavior. But right now, you...