PhotoDude.com

Tue. Aug 24, 2004

Rookie Mistakes

After I blew a gasket in Mr. Pissed Off Swing Voter, a couple of interesting comments were made that are worth dragging to the front page to talk about. They raise questions about how this technology we love so dearly, “personal publishing” and the “blogosphere,” may have altered this race. And not for the better.

Scott Chafin started off by wondering…

...what is different this time and why it makes a difference to people like yourself. I’m genuinely interested in an intellectually-disconnected way, since the current kerfluffle has no bearing on me and my vote one way or the other.

Negative campaigning seems to have been outsourced, to some degree, allowing the pols to stay in their ivory towers. How did that happen, and why did that happen? We bloggers talk about the power of personal publishing, and here we have two premier examples in MoveOn and SBVT, taking their message to the people. We can argue all the live-long day about funding and shadowy ties to ___ supporters, and I don’t want to do that. What I want to talk about is this: is this the inevitable result of the personal publishing “revolution?” When you look at it like I do, from a solidly Red State, with no dog in the hunt, I see nothing but citizens (you, me, etc.) following the game plan as laid down by Big Media for a hundred years — smear, smear, then smear some more. We’ve been watching the game from the stands, and now, Bingo! We get to play. And this is what we, the citizens, do. Not very pretty or honorable.

Then Ole amplified:

Scott: You’ve nailed it. The downside of the internet is the fact that you can, if you wish to do so, for your entire life avoid any opinion that challenges your own views.

And the wingnuts and their likes are doing exactly that big time right now — thus making up their own little cozy world of “it’s either us or armageddon (or some other non-biblical ending of the world).”

I’ve read tons of comments along the lines of “I never read a paper or watch the news anymore ‘cause those Old Media are biased like hell and never report the TRUTH! But now I’ve found the truth here in the blogosphere and I’ll never look back.”

That’s simply sad, because it’s the fertilizer that’s making these insane campaigns grow even wilder than before…

BTW – I’m not a US citizen, I don’t live in the US. These are observations from abroad, untainted by partisan US politics :-)

When I first read Scott’s comparison of personal publishing — a place like ‘dis — to the “two premier examples in MoveOn and SBVT,” I didn’t think it was comparable. But in a way, it is. My first thought was that “personal publishing” like mine can’t possibly “influence” people like one of these 527’s, and while that’s true, that’s not a valid comparison either. If you think of these larger 527’s compared to the larger (read, higher trafficked) sites like Instapundit/Daily Kos/[insert popular partisan blogger here], it comes closer. Those sites have a lot more “influence” on people because, like the bigger 527’s, they have a lot more “currency.” Because on the web, traffic is currency.

Thus, a lower currency/traffic site like mine has less chance to influence. Unless it has some highly volatile info to peddle (or even a particularly nasty way of peddling old info). Then, a “low currency” 527 like the Swift Boat Veterans can make the big splash like the Big Boys (I say they are “low currency” because their funding is a fraction of the larger 527’s like MoveOn.org). But big splashes sure do attract all kinds of attention, don’t they?

Just call me Mr. Happy He’s Low Currency.

There’s huge pools of passion on both sides of this election, and in 2004 the power of personal publishing has spread so far and wide, even within the official campaigns, that people have leaped at the chance to pour out that passion and publish it. As they’ve always been told is a Good Thing on the web.

But that passion seeks reinforcement, nourishment, and sustainment. It often finds it within its own comment threads (the passionate who can’t/won’t/don’t blog are vast in number), as well as at a host of like minded sites, and before you know it, the Echo Chamber effect becomes strong. You hear what you want to hear, and you feed more of same. The two sides don’t even talk at each other, they shout past each other. As Ole aptly notes, “it’s the fertilizer that’s making these insane campaigns grow even wilder than before.”

Which kind of throws a big mirror up in my face. Am I so much more torqued out over these “insane campaigns” because of that wealth of partisan personal publishing? It’s possible. I’ve tried to be very cognizant of it, and act on it. But it’s possible.

How have I acted on it? Well, it started many months back when I stopped looking at comment threads at a lot of sites, because of the high levels of extremist noise that just made my head feel like it was filled with angry bees. Then I stopped going to a lot of those sites … at all. I’ve largely moved to a “aggregator” based view of “what’s happenin’ now” on the web. Oh, sure, I use Bloglines, but I’m talking more about things like Blogdex (and its host of imitators). And particularly Memeorandum. It gives a nice summary view of what articles are being talked about, and right below each one is a list of who is linking it. That list tells me a lot about the article before I even click it, because it is often four to six “lefties,” or four to six “righties.” Lately, it’s been quite rare that there’s an article that both sides link equally. And when they do, the little dozen word blurbs from each linking site, taken en masse, are often all I feel I need to see from those sites.

It’s all become quite predictable, and for me, predictably infuriating. So I just try not to go there at all anymore. My “filters” have become less “individually chosen” and more “aggregated by some chunk of code.” But there are still a handful of individual’s sites that I visit regularly, because they’ve been steadily level headed and intellectually honest, whether they lean left or right. A sad handful.

Scott asks “is this the inevitable result of the personal publishing ‘revolution?’” I think maybe this was the inevitable result … the first time. Yes, there were blogs talking about the election in 2000 (including me), but not many. This year there are blogs at the conventions. This is “the big debut.” Perhaps it is inevitable that we would collectively handle it like rookies, let our passion and emotion overwhelm our reason, and affect our performance. Just like you see right now in a lot of training camps around the NFL, where rookies are being cut, right and left.

I fear it’s too late to turn this big ship around by November, we’ll just have to ride it into the iceberg, and hope the dance band plays pretty tunes as we go down.

Like the lessons learned from the Dean campaign, they won’t be appreciated until the patient is completely dead, and autopsied. Right now, it’s hard to get the doctors to agree on the disease, never mind a remedy.

And with that closing metaphorical hat trick, I’ll leave it to you to explain what’s wrong with my theory.