I posted a response to question posed by a Facebook friend about the blur between personal and professional life on Facebook. She asked us to post an answer on her Facebook wall… a public space for Facebook members. In the spirit of the question and request for the wall, I am cross posting […]
I have been a bit distracted from blog writing recently since starting my new job. But I wanted to post an article I recently published on Idealware. It is called ‘Affordable New Tools and Strategies for Online Activism.”
Here is an excerpt:
Limited budgets don’t have to substantially limit your online advocacy possibilities. Alan Rosenblatt […]
Blog this and blog that
Blog it all and blog a blogging brat
We don’t want a campaign that looks just like that
I don’t want a campaign that looks just like that
I am not a self-hating blogger, though I am a fan of Captain Kirk and the Sex Pistols. Personally, I think blogs are swell. I know bloggers. Bloggers are friends of mine. But online campaigns are not just about bloggers. However, after reading so much mainstream press coverage about Politics 2.0 lately (for example, in Mother Jones this month), one might conclude that the sun rises and sets only on blogs and the bloggers that write them. There is so much more to online campaigning that we do ourselves a great disservice when we narrow our focus too much on blogs.
The sudden interest in Obamagirl’s Crush on Barack music video provides a great opporunity to talk once more about the nature of internet communications. As I have often argued, the net is a chaotic message environment precisely because it enables anyone, as long as they have access to a wired computer, to post their own ideas and opinions. And this content has no editor other than the poster.
So, just as the 1984 video before swept through the campaign news cycle, the Obamagirl video may be starting its sweep now.
But what does this mean for the candidate?
A techPresident comment I posted 5.31.2007
The internet can be used to create global, national, or local campaigns as well as it can be used to create campaigns on any issue or any candidate for any position. Computers have long been called virtual machines. “Virtual” because they can be programmed to do just about anything (except think, so they say). And networked computers are more powerful exponentially raised to the power of the number of computers/nodes/end users connected to it. That is pretty powerful and virtually anything is possible.
The news is buzzing today as Fred Thompson has quit "Law & Order" in order to launch a presidential bid. He has also indicated he plans to use the internet extensively in his campaign. In a blog post to Pajama Media last week, Thompson wrote, "So, I hear you all have been talking about me." And thus begins his online conversation with voters. Clearly, the tone is intimate and personal, just as a blog post should be.
And it seems he really does understand the power of the internet to transform politics.
At the risk of losing my head, I will tumble into the fray with a response to the Queen’s Screed presented in the latest issue of the Turner Report. Though the Queen and I have been friends for more than fifteen years, I submit she often looks at political communications through the lens of the Nixon-Kennedy debate, while I see it through the monitor as I sit clicking in a coat I borrowed from Howard Dean. And the ultimate irony, perhaps, is that my doctoral thesis was on presidential use of television to manipulate public opinion. I know televised politics. Televised politics was a friend of mine. And the internet is no televised politics.
Tom Friedman says the internet is the dial tone of the 21st Century. Really? To me, “dial tone” conjures up images of one-to-one conversations over a dedicated line. But the internet is an omni conversational dynamic platform. One-to-one, sure, but also one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many conversations are also possible. So the use of such a round world metaphor as a dial tone by Mr. Friedman seems most inappropriate.
This has been another instant reflection brought to you from the Personal Democracy Forum by DrDigiPol. 
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