Dr. DigiPol

Email is not dead, but it is becoming less effective as people shift to other online communications channels. Campaign websites are not a waste of space, but they are no longer the center of the universe for gathering activists. This is the new online world, a dispersed world where instant messaging, social networks, and SMS text messaging are the new hot communication channels and social networks, blogs, and social media websites are where people gather online.

I have been hearing a lot lately about how we are facing a mortgage crisis of huge proportions. Lenders have overextended themselves with high risk, variable interest rate loans and now people are defaulting on loans in droves. There is a lot of talk about how the extent of this problem is so bad, markets could collapse. A crisis, n’est pas?

As a follower of the presidential campaigns, of course I wondered what the candidates were saying about this serious crisis facing America. So I went to all of their websites to search for what I needed to know. I found some information on Dennis Kucinich’s, John Edwards’, and a wee bit on Barack Obama’s sites. But I found something I did not expect to find.

No search!

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.