Gaging Net Politics

mrG — Fri, 08 Aug 2003 08:25:55 -0400

Received an email from Care2 with a brief summary of the year so far ...

January 3, 2003: Certain timber sales are excluded from environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act.
February 3, 2003: The budget proposal for fiscal year 2004 cuts funding to the EPA, land conservation, and renewable energy programs.
March 25, 2003: The decision to phase out polluting snowmobiles in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks is overturned despite massive public outcry.
April 11, 2003: The Bush Administration announces that it will restrict the number of acres that are eligible for wilderness protection, potentially allowing development of millions of acres of federal lands.
May 14, 2003: The EPA proposes delaying new rules to reduce smog, endangering the lives of 47 million Americans living in polluted urban areas.
August 8, 2003: Care2 delivers over 20,300 public comments urging the president to protect endangered species.

Fair enough (and well put). I can insert another:

August 6, 2003: A Google News search for "Howard Dean" brings up "an eye-popping 4,340 stories."

A Google news scan for "Sheila Copps" today rated a mere 279 -- "Paul Martin" rates less than 812.

But ... is it working?

Those of us inside the Internet environment have always had a problem of perspectives. It's the classical McLuhanist problem of being inside any environment; the view from within is particularly perturbed. We think of it as everywhere because it's all around us, we think of it as important because, hey, like, we are in it (and we're all so beautiful, right?), we have heros and celebrities (like Linus, Mena, Doc and Winer) completely anonymous outside infinitesimal circles of friends and yet our days are filled with their focus, and these days, we even have the mainstream media who have likewise become engulfed in the network, surrounded by it, with multi-millions in vested interests propping any inflated illusions of the importance of it.

"When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it. -- Pooh

But after all these two or three decades of our techno dream coloured self-agrandizing hypnosis, could we really be part of a significant self-organizing political force?

Sure, we talk about usurping the Second Superpower title, we talk of Flash Mobs and individual acts of petition and protest, but how do we know our networking is affecting political outcomes any more than, say, tradition means of magazine opinions and CNN/CBC pundits? We so want "our side" to be right, to be the victor, but is it?

I'm not so sure we'll know this time around. In Canada, we have Mr.Martin (sans any Mr.Bradley) vs Ms.Copps, we have the Toronto Mayoral Race, and every last man Jack of them are online firmly rooted in middle-90's Information Services (read "listen to our server database mentality" -- even if one or the other were to change to social software methods, do we have enough sample to wrest the net-weight from the personalities on the voting outcome?

Ditto for Dean. We on the inside of the net think he's making an amazing run, and it seems a reasonable chain of causalities (yeah, right, and so does the Atkins diet), but can we know if his net-viral conversation machine is reaching the un(packet)washed masses?

"All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them." -- Galileo

I ask as an innocent, not as a technician. It's a common problem with almost every new turn of the IT: It's hard to sell new untested technology without backing data, but without sales, we have no data. As a result, we have an industry just like the mainstream performing arts, where every drop of funded effort is spent whipping up unfounded enthusiasms -- aka hype -- the sole and express purpose of it being making the sale so we can see if we were, indeed, right.

That's the problem I have right now in flogging social software. Just because it seems right to insiders, just because an approach is humanist and egalitarian, just because it seems like it really really really should be right, if we learn anything at all from the science of astronomy, we should learn that even the very best and most elegant of theories can be, and often are, dreadfully wrong. We need a certain humility that's ready (some say eager) to admit mistake, go back to the math, and try again.

"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are -- if it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong." -- Richard Feynman

But let's be fair, IT doesn't hold patent on Gonzo Deployments. Our penchant for the thoughtless may even be only an artifact of our gratifications greed. A blog I read last week (that's since drifted off the end of my aggregators, and thus out of my retrievable memory) mused on how, as our consideration increases, so does doubt and reservation. By induction, then, the less one thinks, the less one must reason over conditions and outcomes and consequencies, and thus the faster they can deliver a solution -- while those who are careful and considerate and cautions are still working on the thoughtful plan, others have already legislated the destruction of the wilderness.

And what does this have to do with political blogs? Maybe only this: Let's allow ourselves the option to be wrong while we're vigilant to see if we're right.

There. Now you all know why I'm so hopeless at sales.

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Gaging Net Politics