Archive: Year: 2012

Back during the first week of January 2011, things in the world of politics, technology, government and social change seemed more or less normal. Oh, and then there was January 6th. Tunisia was experiencing a wave of protests and strikes, and we reported on how an effort by the Tunisian government to steal the Facebook and Gmail passwords of human rights and democracy activists had provoked a wave of DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks by Anonymous, the global hacking collective. Suddenly, the world seemed to be turning faster. And indeed, as you read through this compilation of the best of techPresident from 2011, as well as the prognostications of thirty of our smartest friends and fellow travelers as they look...

Here are my slides and a "pencast" mashup of the audio and my real-time hand-written notes on the panel I did Sunday March 11 at SXSW along with Teddy Goff, Obama 2012 digital director; Zeynep Tufekci of the University of North Carolina; Claudia Milne, the BBC.com online's North American editor; and Michael Scherer of Time magazine, who was our moderator. Our topic was "Election 2012: Campaigns, Coverage & the Internet," but Tufekci and I both tried hard to shift the conversation away from easy patter about the presidential campaigns are making smart use of social media, and onto the harder question of who is actually being empowered by all the new and more sophisticated uses of technology that we're seeing...

The controversial rightwing online publisher Andrew Breitbart died early this morning, his website BigJournalism.org reports. Brietbart had been an editor at the Drudge Report and helped launch the Huffington Post before starting his own mini-empire of websites Breitbart.tv, BigJournalism, BigGovernment, BigHollywood and BigPeace. During his time running those sites, he practiced a kind of shock journalism that blended occasional real scoops with selective editing and deliberate provocations of his targets. Indeed, Breitbart's reputation for hoaxing was so strong, as the news of his death spread this morning people were wondering if this could also be a publicity stunt — that is, until the Los Angeles coroner confirmed the news. Breitbart, very much at home in the Internet-fueled, 24-hour news cycle,...

"Despite the increasing importance of social media in business, there is no solid evidence that it matters in politics," writes Gregory Ferenstein in AdAgeDigital in a lengthy article titled "Waiting for the 'Twitter Election?' Keep Waiting." His proof? --"Internet heavyweight Ron Paul hasn't won a single primary." --Mitt Romney's huge lead among Facebook fans (1.5 million to Paul's 869,000 and Rick Santorum's 149,000) didn't prevent him from losing the last three primaries in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri. --Tea Party belle Sharron Angle had seven times as many Facebook fans as Senator Harry Reid, but that didn't keep her from losing 50-45% in their 2010 race. --"On the internet, no one knows you didn't vote"--that is, social network connections are far weaker in motivating people...

Conservatives are using online social media in innovative new ways, catching up to or surpassing their counterparts on the other side of the aisle. This Thursday on the Personal Democracy Plus call, I'm looking forward to talking with Martin Avila, whose firm Terra Eclipse worked on Ron Paul's 2008 website, and more recently has partnered with Freedom Works to launch Freedom Connector, a social network that has grown to more than 160,000 active members in just one year. Avila looks at Washington politics from about as far from the Beltway as you can get, working from his base in Santa Cruz, California. He's a critic of campaigns that use the internet as more top-down vehicle for pushing their message at...

Last May, when I heard that Wael Ghonim, the Egyptian revolutionary (and Google marketing executive) who had surreptitiously built the "We Are All Khaled Said" Facebook page that helped spark the January 25, 2011 uprising, had signed a $2.25 million book deal with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to write a memoir, I cringed a little. Not because I begrudged Ghonim a single penny of his seven-figure advance--which he is donating to Egyptian charities and to the families of the January 25 victims. But I worried that the pressure to write a best-seller that could recoup that huge advance might result in a book tailored to American readers accustomed to feel-good stories of individual struggle and success, or one of those "as...

The first time I got an email from the Obama campaign asking me for a measly $3 contribution was back in October 2010. "Micah, I need you in the game," read the subject line, with "Barack Obama" as the sender. The ask made sense in context: the campaign was trying to pull as many people as possible back into action, and thus the absurdly low-dollar ask--coupled with a promise of a dollar-to-dollar match from another Obama supporter--didn't seem outlandish. If money is the mother's milk of politics, every drop counts--especially if the cost of scooping it up is ridiculously low as well. Fast forward to today. We're bombarded with pitches for cheap apps, and when spending 99 cents on one is...

According to Matt Bai, the chief political correspondent for the New York Times Magazine, the progressive netroots upsurge of the mid-2000s and the rise of the Tea Party from 2009 to present are two variations on a common theme: they are "flash movements" born of online connections, cathartic urges and the devaluation of expertise. And unlike the big social movements of the past, he said both movements were merely oppositional and "ephemeral," unlikely to bring big changes to government. Speaking at a lunchtime forum here at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School (where I am ensconced for the spring), Bai drew on his experiences writing about the netroots for his book, The Argument,...

Last night, a crowd of more than one hundred gathered on the sixth floor of MIT's Media Lab to help Rebecca MacKinnon launch her new book, The Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom. The audience included net luminaries like Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, and Andrew Newman, the director of the Tor Project, and the discussion was at the same level. Count me among those who are thoroughly convinced by MacKinnon's reporting and arguments. The heart of her book can be summed up by these two quotes: It is time to stop debating whether the Internet is an effective tool for political expression, and to move on to the much more urgent question of...

I watched the "enhanced version" of President Obama's State of the Union speech last night, which was streamed live from WhiteHouse.gov, and it worked. That is, I found myself paying closer attention to the parts of the speech that were being "enhanced" by the addition of a variety of photographs and charts--89 in all--that the White House inserted alongside the video of the President speaking. But there were also some odd effects. For one, I don't remember a thing that Obama said, though I do remember the slide illustrating the rise in income of the top 1% of the population, and I also remember the slide that illustrated the need to streamline government jobs programs by showing a PacMan eating...