extensions

[Ed. note: This is my first attempt at writing a history of the relationship between Obama and the netroots." A couple notes: (1) It's a draft, still working on it, and would love comments re: what I'm missing; (2) There's a problem with the term "netroots," as there is no monolithic group -- they (we) don't all follow the great orange you-know-what. That said, until I figure out how to deal with that, I'm using netroots as a short-cut.]

The most significant event of this week was the culmination of what blogger Matt Stoller calls Obama’s “accountability moment“: his willingness to support the current FISA bill, and the blogosphere’s reaction to that statement.

The reaction in the press has been one of surprise — here is Barack Obama, the “online” candidate, facing backlash from the “netroots” (the left-leaning political blogosphere). The reason for this unexpected reaction is really the conflation of two aspects of the 2008 primary campaign: the continuing growth of the influence and power the netroots has within the Democratic Party, and the success of the Obama campaign using social networking tools effectively during the election. The two, though, are not the same, and a brief history of Senator Obama’s relationship with the political blogosphere can shed some light on the difference.

(more…)

The AP fair use saga continues…summed up pretty well here.

A lot of the “why is everyone dumping on Bob Cox” could have probably been avoided with a bit more transparency on the part of the “Media Bloggers Association.” Dave Winer says the MBA’s not so bad, pointing out that a “blogger who’s being harassed by the AP needs help, [and Cox's MBA is] providing it.”

But who is the Media Bloggers Association?

Via boing boing, we find a link, with Cox stating:

As I’ve already said elsewhere, I have never ever said that I represent “bloggers”

Funny, because the web site states:

The Media Bloggers Association is a nonpartisan organization dedicated to promoting, protecting and educating its members…Our members include veteran and newly minted bloggers, seasoned journalists and those who don’t consider themselves journalists, political conservatives, moderates and liberals.”

So this “association” that claims to represent “veteran and newly minted bloggers” now doesn’t represent bloggers?

Furthermore, exactly *who* are the members of this organization?

Can’t find it anywhere on the web site.

Go figure.

[update] Apparently, Jeff Jarvis, Micah Sifry, and Jay Rosen are among the founding members of the MBA?

Again, transparency. If this was widely and easily known, I doubt the blogosphere would have erupted the way it did re: Cox and the MBA. These folks bring credibility, and knowing this would have prevented or at least discouraged people from questioning the reputation of this organization.

The dust up between the AP and the entire blogosphere has been well-discussed over the last few days. But one aspect of this issue that I haven’t seen is the question of appropriation in terms of the larger media landscape. In short, the AP is worried about protecting its IP, but in its heavy-handed approach, ignores the fact that the entire news media business is built on…ahem…”borrowing” stories and ideas from other media sources.

The tactics the AP is taking here is a well-worn path. Back in 2002, the Online Journalism Review wrote on this very issue — whether or not blogs are a “parasitic” medium:

I hear the frustration behind the comment. You bust your rear to get stories in the paper, then watch bloggers grab traffic talking about your work. All the while your bosses are laying off other reporters, citing circulation declines, as analysts talk about newspapers losing audience to the Web. It’s not hard to understand why many newspaper journalists would come to view blogs as parasites, sucking the life from their newsrooms.

Still, the charge riles me every time I hear it. To me, it’s a poorly informed insult of many hard-working Web publishers who are doing fresh, informative and original work. And by dismissing blogs as “parasitic,” newspaper journalists make themselves blind to the opportunities that blogging, as well as independent Web publishing in general, offer to both the newspaper industry and newspaper journalists.

And on the larger issue of the media in general:

Gordon reminded that bloggers are not alone in referencing reporter’s work.

“There is a long tradition *within journalism* of publishing and broadcasting the work of people whose primary contribution to discourse is opinion and analysis. Bloggers fall squarely within this tradition. They are parasitic only if your definition of journalism consists only of original reporting.”

If bloggers are parasitic, then so are the opinion pundits, talk radio hosts, and television broadcasters. The latter, in fact, is quite common, or at least seems so. For example, recently The New York Times front-paged an article that took on Obama’s charge that McCain would be a Bush third term. Later that day, on CNN, here’s Wolf Blitzer:

Democrats say, if you vote for John McCain, you will really be voting for a third Bush term. So, how true is that? Mary Snow is looking at the similarities between the candidate and the president.

Coincidence?

Any attribution to the NYT?

Bloggers are the new kid, the easy mark. And something of a threat to the institution of journalism. But to ignore the parasitic nature of journalism in general, and go after bloggers for copy and pasting articles — something that is actually rarely done in the blogosphere — is just plain silly.

The McCain campaign’s approach to blogs:

The McCain campaign in late May launched a new blogger outreach section on its website that encourages supporters to lobby for their candidate across 94 blogs that range in political bent from far left to far right.

The campaign arms the blog-raiders with one of McCain’s speeches on the need to transcend partisan politics to deal with the problems that the nation faces.

As the Wired article notes, an initial attempt at this over at the left-leaning Daily Kos was spotted and called out within four minutes. It’s a terrible approach, because it misses an essential aspect of understanding blog communities: the anonymity-pseudonymity continuum.

This is the “no one knows you’re a dog” problem. Bloggers, working within a text-based medium, only have their words to represent them; there are no visual or non-verbal clues, so essential to “real life” communication for filling in what we know (or think we know) about each other. For bloggers, trust and credibility can only be built up over time, through their words, through their actions, through becoming valued and trusted members of the community, and this applies as much to a group blog (such as Daily Kos) as it does to a gathering of commenters (like you see at sites such as Swampland, or Firedoglake).

When we first create an account on a blog, we are anonymous — nameless, faceless, no credibility. Over time, as others get to know us through our comments and blog posts, we slowly move along the continuum . At some point, our anonymity fades — our anonymity becomes pseudonymity. The distinction between these two aspects of blog identity is described in this post by blogger Marcy Wheeler, who writes under the name “emptywheel”:

Pseudonymity is the maintenance of a consistent identity, one to which credibility–or lack thereof–attaches just like it does to the name Bob Cox or Marcy Wheeler. Anonymity is something different, one that doesn’t exist in any fully formed blog.…pseudonymity is one of the most important aspects to retaining the vitality of the blogosphere.

This “constant identity” is reinforced through the day-to-day engagement within the community of a blog. There is a “getting-to-know-ness” about blogging as a social practice, as, over time, bloggers learn more and more about the real-life situations, attitudes, personalities, and politics of others in the community. Reputation and standing within the blog community is based entirely on the history of one’s comments (sometimes called “mojo” or “karma” on blogs) built up over time. Anonymity is fleeting, while pseudonymity is rooted in real world social relations.

All of which is to say that the idea of McCain supporters posting Republican talking points on liberal blogs like Daily Kos is ridiculous, not because of ideology, but because of trust. There’s simply no reason to trust someone who signs up for an account on a liberal web site and argues from the right.

The point may be a bit subtle, and should not be confused with what Ethan Zuckerman has written about homophily; that is, how “birds of a feather” tend to blog together. Or confused with Cass Sunstein’s sharper critique about group polarization; that is, how after deliberation, people tend to move in a more “extreme” position.

While both of those ideas may also be true, I think, in practice, McCain’s blog strategy won’t work, not because liberals won’t listen to conservative ideas, but because his supporters will simply be perceived anonymous bloggers (in fact, his supporters may have trouble getting their points across on moderate and even right-leaning sites, too). His swarm (if it amounts to that…) of supporters, creating accounts on blogs and posting away, won’t take the time required to move across the anonymity-pseudonymity continuum, in order to cultivate the trust needed to bridge the gap between the noobs and the community of bloggers and commenters already present.

Kos wrote a dumb post mocking McCain’s teeth. Not one, but two diaries on the rec list, asking him to pull it. Tons of comments concur in all three.

Who says bloggers ain’t civilized?

The tech-focused blog TechCrunch has today added the ability for readers to post comments in video format. The obvious take against is that it’s simply more of our narcissistic culture coming through, that not only do we have to sift through the banality of the blogosphere’s chattering class, but now we have to look at them too! On the other hand, we could easily see this as a step towards making the web more personal, more human.

(The fact that one of the video comments from TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington has a dog incessantly barking in the background seems to be a strong argument against this new feature…just sayin’…)

Video commenting does raise interesting questions, though, regarding previous posts I have written, about Walter Ong’s notion of orality and today’s social media. In particular, I wonder if video comments make the blogosphere a more “oral” space? Walter Ong, from a 1996 interview:

Computerized communication can thus suggest the immediate experience of direct sound. I believe that is why computerized verbalization has been assimilated to secondary ‘orality,’ even when it comes not in oral-aural format but through the eye, and thus is not directly oral at all. Here textualized verbal exchange registers psychologically as having the temporal immediacy of oral exchange.

Ong’s “secondary orality” refers to how electronic media can form people into groups, and create communities. The comments section of a blog can be seen, in this light, as something oral, something suggesting the “immediate experience of direct sound,” something that extends us outward rather than inward.

So the question is, does the addition of video to the comments section of a blog add anything to this idea of orality?

After trying it as a reader, I don’t think so. Running through the comments over at TechCrunch, I find viewing the video comments clumsy — you have to break the “flow” of reading, you need to wait for the video to load, you need to deal with uneven sound levels.

And dogs barking.

Part of the experience of participating in a blog’s community is this flow, a rhythm that develops as you read through the comments: you scroll past some, you read through the one’s from people you know, you find key words that catch your eye. Reading through text comments, frankly, is much quicker and “smoother” than clicking on video comments. The fact that it all happens inside your head has everything to do with why reading isn’t as jarring as the videos; yet, at the same time, it seems counterintuitive to “orality” — reading is an interior practice. This paradox is what Ong is getting at in the above quote.

In any case, perhaps it’s just a practice thing, and one day “reading” video comments will seem just as fluid as reading text-based comments.

But, for now, I’m sticking with text.

The use of new media has been flourishing this campaign season, as digital tools, platforms, and social networking sites have increasingly opened access to our political discourse. “Obama Girl” might be the most notable, but much has also remained somewhat under the radar (or, at least, off network television). Nancy Scola, for example, recently posted about Obama “folk art” that has been popping up.

Yesterday, though, something a bit different happened. Spencer Ackerman, a political blogger who uses music lyrics for his blog’s headlines, posted video from a speech where Obama “brushed” Hillary’s attacks off his shoulders. Ackerman connected the dots, and titled his post “You Gotta Get (Get) That (That) Dirt Off Your Shoulder,” referencing a Jay-Z lyric, calling it “perhaps the coolest subliminal cultural reference in the history of American politics.” Eight hours later, the mashups began, and Ackerman posted one, and then another video from YouTube. [Note: both videos removed subsequent to writing this for legal reasons.]

Why is this significant?

Because, as Ari Melber points out in his post on these mashups, Barack Obama is a Jay-Z fan.

The term “fan culture” is used by MIT’s Henry Jenkins to describe what was often formerly seen as the “reception” side of cultural production. Studying fans allows us “to understand ways that new media can be used to transform our relationship to mass media.” It is the convergence of the passion of fans with new, digital media tools and web sites that has created a more “participatory” culture.

In Barack Obama, then, we not only have a Presidential candidate, but we have a fan. A fan who responds to what happened in a Presidential debate with a sly Jay-Z reference (caught by a blogger), which, in turn, encourages more fans to create mashups of Obama’s speech with Jay-Z’s music.

There is a certain reciprocity here, between Obama and his “fans,” a subtle message of both sincere fandom on Obama’s part, and an “I get it…” nod to his (often young) supporters.

This is certainly more than we’d ever see from either John McCain or Hillary Clinton — it’s definitely a function of “the age thing.” And it’s not a pander; at least I don’t read it that way.

It’s a gesture from a fan, something only a fan would do. And it’s something we’re likely to see more of, as people steeped in today’s participatory culture rise to positions of power.

Can an official Jay-Z Presidential campaign theme far behind?

[Update: Videos available at this Daily Kos post.]

It’s fascinating what the primary campaign has done to the liberal blogosphere. Granted, we’re still in the middle of it, and, personally, my guess is this split isn’t going to be long-lasting, once the Democrats settle on a nominee. But it’s astounding how the campaign has exposed fractures among bloggers (although it’s possible and maybe even likely the fractures were always there…).

For those who haven’t followed, here’s a quick summary from Open Left:

This tendency of “birds of a feather” to “flock together” is called homophily. In this case it’s “value homophily,” blog readers and contributors have gravitated toward the blogs that support their values, in this case the blog or blogs where writers say nice things about their preferred candidate. For example, for much of 2007 the Big Orange Satan was an Edwards blog and slowly morphed into an Obama blog in January. MyDD has become the home of Clinton supporters. This “flocking” was seen most dramatically when DKos contributors went on “strike” and took their efforts to more Clinton-friendly environs.

The “strike” marked the point where the split became public, covered by the news media, including the Times. The complaint, sentiment that is echoed elsewhere in the blogosphere, was:

…the administrators have allowed this hostile environment to develop in our online community for anyone who isn’t planted firmly in the Obama camp. They’ve routinely ignored personal attacks and allowed disruptive, spam-like posts to go unchecked whenever anyone expresses support for Hillary or challenges something their candidate has said or done…As a result, our community has become little more than an echo chamber with an attitude that harkens back to the early days of Dubbya’s administration - yer either with us or yer a’gin us, heh!

A commenter in a post at TalkLeft, another “pro-Clinton” site, believes “[TPM's Josh] Marshall, Kos and their like hate Clinton so much that they would destroy the Democratic party to ensure that Obama wins the nomination.” While this is something of a cherry-pick, the intention is simply to illustrate the extremes to which bloggers are reaching when talking about others who, in the big picture of things, are on the same side.

Of course, Obama supporters have their own complaints, perhaps the most significant being the characterization of them as vapid and “cultists.”

Is this just politics? Is this a natural result of the primary practice, but made more overt and public through the medium of the blog? Is this just what happens when more people are given a space to participate?

I have previously posted about what I call “the orality of blogging,” using Walter Ong’s work to help situate the blog in terms of our media past, and perhaps reformulate his concept of “secondary orality” in terms of social media. Ong identifies “agonistically toned” as one of the characteristics of an oral culture, noting how “orality situates knowledge within a context of struggle.” There is a certain parallel here — the political blogosphere, at its most basic level, has always been about struggle and contestation. It seems appropriate that the 2008 primary campaign, played out at the same time bloggers find themselves entrenched in “mainstream” politics more than ever before, became the center of this struggle.

The question now, of course, is whether or not the movement to separate “flocks” is permanent, or whether, once a nominee is selected, the focus turns to a common foe, and the sense of community, which for the world of orality was a necessity, returns in the “secondary orality” of the blogosphere.

Ong, in Orality and Literacy, notes how print is a closed medium:

The printed text is supposed to represent the words of an author in definitive or ‘final’ form. For print is comfortable only with finality. Once a letterpress forme is closed, locked up, or a photolithographic plate is made, and the sheet printed, the text does not accommodate changes (erasures, insertions) so readily as do written texts. (pg. 130)

Ong also marks print as an important development in acquiring our sense of privacy, as reading, which previously was a social activity, became silent, an individualistic practice. Print encouraged the “private ownership of words,” and resentment at plagiarism developed as a result.

In contrast with print, the blog is an open medium. It is, most importantly, never final — the reverse chronology of the blog’s posts creates an implicit open-ended form. A post itself can also be edited, and some bloggers, Glenn Greenwald of Salon comes to mind, frequently use an “Update:” to continually add new information to their pages.

The blog, interestingly, parallels in many aspects what Ong and McLuhan call “manuscript culture,” that period of time after the invention of the alphabet, after writing, but before print fully restructured our consciousness:

…manuscripts, with their glosses or marginal comments (which often got worked into the text in subsequent copies) were in dialogue with the world outside their own borders. They remained closer to the give-and-take of oral expression. The readers of manuscripts are less closed off from the author, less absent, than are the readers of those writing for print.

Here the corollary to the blogosphere is evident: comments, a close relationship between “author” and “reader,” the give-and-take of discourse.

Unlike the closed world of print, the blog is open, confounding our previous conceptions of public and private, always subject to edit, always waiting for the next, new post.

Walter Ong, from Orality and Literacy:

By removing words from the world of sound where they had first had their origin in active human interchange and relegating them definitively to visual surface, and by otherwise exploiting visual space for the management of knowledge, print encouraged human beings to think of their own interior conscious and unconscious resources as more and more thing-like, impersonal, and religiously neutral. Print encourage the mind to sense that its possessions were held in some sort of inert mental space. (pg. 129)

This interiority imposed on our consciousness by print culture is precisely what social media — and blogs especially — are helping to reverse. This is perhaps one of the most significant aspects of today’s media: we are drawn outward, rather than inward.

In particular, the group or community-based blog encourages a “return of the oral,” as the words typed into a blog are not closed, not final, but open-ended, as is a conversation. They’re specifically written with the expectation of a response, inside the blog’s “comments” sections. The “interior conscious” that print encourages is now, on the blog, an exterior consciousness, captured within a database.

The blog is both drawing us outward in terms of relating to other people, and creating an exteriority of thought in its database.