We are not a nation divided.... We are a nation undecided
: A few posts in recent days have grappled with the contention of some that we are living in a more fragmented, some would say balkinized world -- and many blame the Internet for that.
Those who say that are wrong about the Internet, wrong about the natural state of the world in media and politics and marketing, wrong about the current state of American politics, wrong about about the cause for all this change, and essentially insulting to the intelligence and spirit of their fellow man and fundamentally cynical about democracy. Take that!
See Jay Rosen's comment at Davos that the age of mass media is just that -- an age.
And today, Jack Balkin follows up on his eloquent refutal of Republic.com a few days ago by refuting a New York Times story that frets over fragmentation.
The Times says:
The Internet became the ultimate tool for finding like minds and blocking out others long before supporters of candidates began seeking one another out on Meetup.com. With online dating sites where searches can be tailored by age and income, e-mail forums for the most narrow band of subjects, bookmarked sites and even spam filters, the Web allows users to tailor the information they consume more than any other medium. Social scientists even have a term for it: cyberbalkanization.
And Balkin replies:
The article runs together two different kinds of democratic activities: One is organizing followers for a political campaign, where you want people of like minds to get together, the other is engaging in democratic discussion about public issues with people who may disagree (and disagree strongly) with you. These two activities are part of democracy, *but they are not the same activity.* Both are necessary, but it is often difficult to do both at the same time.
Exactly.
In fact, if these fearful critics read citizens' media, they would understand that it is incredibly open: You have to link to that with which you disagree so you can argue with it and by doing so, you send people to your opposition and absorb that opposition's viewpoint in what you write.
But candidate weblogs, as I've
said often, are not citizens' media; they are political organizing tools and damned good ones.
Both are important tools in a democracy. Both serve different roles. Neither balkinizes. The organizing tools of the Internet get more citizens involved. The citizens' media tools enable more citizens to be heard than ever before. Together, they are healthy for democracy.
Now as to fragmentation, I've said often that the real revolutionary invention of the last century was the remote control (added to the cable box and the VCR), for that gave the audience the freedom to select what it wanted to watch, not what three network executives wanted them to watch. This is how I put it a few days ago:
The remote control and cable killed mass media like a volcanic eruption; the Internet is the forest that grows in the ashes.
Given choice, the audience, of course, selects from it. That is the natural order of things in news, entertainment, media,
products of any kind. And it works in all those areas; it serves the market -- that is to say, each of us -- better: I now get the news in which I'm interested from all kinds of new sources. I consume the entertainment that entertains me, not necessarily you. I buy products more customized to my needs. Given choice, of course we take it. That's not fragmentation. That's progress!
There's just one area in which that does not completely work: elections.
For we can't all have the President -- or senator, or congressman, or mayor -- we want.
Somebody has to win.
In the end, we can't be fragmented, segmented, balkinized there; if we are to be a nation united, we have to end up selecting and supporting the winners.
Now there are those who say that we are terribly divided now. I say they are wrong. Here's how I put it in my Star-Ledger op-ed:
And the truth is: We are not all angry. Despite the way media and politicians treat us, we don't all live on the edges, in our red or blue states, facing each other across some new Mason-Dixon line of left vs. right.
We hear all the time how we are a nation divided. But we're not. We are a nation undecided.
Look at the large number of voters in Iowa who settled on whom to support just a week or even a day before the caucuses. They were looking for a leader to march in front of the positive wing of the party, to stand for something.
We are a smart and caring people in a system that works, and we want to hear various viewpoints and select the ones that fit us best and that give us the best chance of winning. That's politics. That's democracy. That works.
The Internet as well as cable are, in fact, doing a great job of providing us -- those who care -- with a tremendous new diversity of sources of information and viewpoints and opinions. This is incredibly healthy for the democracy.
The Internet and cable are not dividing us. They are informing us.
And we are absorbing this information and these viewpoints and deciding in our own sweet time whom to vote for, as is our right. That's what happened in Iowa. That is what is happening across America in what is now -- God bless America! -- a wide-open race.
No, the Internet is not dividing us. Politicians are. Media dinosaurs are.
Yes, if anyone is dividing us -- or trying to -- it is the politicians and pundits who want to think that we are two-dimensional creatures, easily swayed, uncaring, not bright, not informed, set in our ways, angry, and vindictive. How dare they? How awfully insulting of them. How terribly undemocratic.
Yes, it's true that half of American didn't vote for George Bush and half did. But once he was in office, most Americans -- especially after 9/11 -- wanted to support our nation. Most don't want to see us lose in the war on terrorism or in Iraq. Most are patriotic, caring Americans with diverse opinions. Most aren't angry and divided. We can disagree and argue but we are still one nation. Democracy, after all, is a conversation. (To quote myself once more: Get off the bandwagon and get on the Cluetrain!)
All this is the surest sign not of division but of a democracy, working.
The Internet is the best thing that could happen to democracy. This campaign is the proof.
Ambassadors of blogging
: Jay Rosen just put up his notes from his Davos trip:
The one clear role I had here was ambassador for the weblog form. Experts at this are Joi Ito and Loic Le Meur, both of whom joined me on the blogging panel. Joi even told me at last night's closing party that he would like to take a year off from everything and just blog, by which he also meant spread the word.
Amen to that, blogging brothers. There is an admittedly cultish desire to spread this gospel, now that it is in the vulgate. There is a populist motivation to share the power this medium brings. And there is just plain excitement about being involved in something new. As Andrew
Sullivan said: "I say this happens once in a lifetime: You don't stumble across a new medium every day."
Dean's Iraqi heel
: Getaloada the latest from Howard Dean on Iraq:
Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean said Sunday that the standard of living for Iraqis is a ``whole lot worse'' since Saddam Hussein's removal from power in last year's American-led invasion.
``You can say that it's great that Saddam is gone and I'm sure that a lot of Iraqis feel it is great that Saddam is gone,'' said the former Vermont governor, an unflinching critic of the war against Iraq. ``But a lot of them gave their lives. And their living standard is a whole lot worse now than it was before.''
And how the hell does Howard Dean define "standard of living"? Mass murder and rape rooms and jammed political prisons and repression of all freedom. I'd call those negatives when it comes to a standard of living.
The art of losing
: There's an art to losing well and Howard Dean certainly hasn't gotten it. He goes from irrational exuberance to petulant pissiness:
Sharply criticizing the Iowa caucuses, Howard Dean said Saturday that the Democratic Party in that state must police against negative attacks at precinct meetings if it wants to keep its leadoff role in the presidential nominating process.
"While I believe that Iowa should be first," Dean said, "I think they're going to have to change their process to prohibit that kind of behavior inside the caucuses, because if that were to continue, I wouldn't do it again," Dean said.
The former Vermont governor, who finished a distant third in Iowa, told reporters that his opponents "had their folks really beating up on the people who went in, trying to get them to change their minds in caucus."
Dean has blamed his Iowa loss on negative attacks he suffered as a one-time front-runner in the race. His comments Saturday sounded like sour grapes to some in Iowa.
Or it could be that people didn't want to vote for you, Howie. If you think your supporters are so easily cowed, well, then, you don't have a great deal of respect for them and they don't have very strong support for you, eh?
Weblog business auf Deutsch
: Here's the start of an effort at a German weblog content business; they're offering a 40 percent cut to bloggers; seeking bloggers in automotive, gadets, insurance, dating, social software, and more; some in German, some in English, it seems. Some of the first blogs: Parenting, online universities, health (in German). [via Martin Roell]
Meanwhile, in Canada
: Canada has a big election coming up and BlogsCanada has a group election blog.
: And meanwhile in Germany... PapaScott says this is the first European campaign blog (auf Deutsch).
Join the show
: VH1 has a funny new week-in-review show, Best Week Ever. What's doubly cool is that the show has a blog that's part of the process of making the show: The writers are posting what they're thinking about including and they want you to post comments and suggestions and jokes. Here's your chance to break into TV.
Meet the Press should try that.
Campaigning is easy, blogging is hard
: Sen. Gary Hart, appearing on Chris Lydon's show tonight, is listed as a blogger, which is great. Only his last post was in November.
The other side of Mars
: Opportunity lands, sends back its first pictures and, in the words of the NASA site, "reveals a surreal, dark landscape unlike any seen before."
A conspiracy of everybody
: Dave has a conspiracy theory:
Here's a social software smart mob concept. People should vote for Howard Dean because he made such a fool of himself on national television. Here's your chance to blow up the media monopoly.
The only problem is, weblogs went far crazier about Dean's craziness than big, bad media did. The difference is that it worked its way through the gastrointestinal tract of blogs a lot faster than it could through the slow, slogging production of big media. The Star-Ledger assigned me to write an op-ed on the topic days ago; it appears today. And we're sure to see the Scream on the Sunday-morning shows because they think a week at a time while weblogs think an hour at a time. In this case, big media and nanomedia all reacted the same way to Dean -- the right way, I might add -- but just on a different biorhythm.
Educating the west about the rest
: Salam has a wonderful post today answering snarkers (again). They complain he's not a typical Iraqi. He never said he was. And then he talks about the real value of this international blogging thing:
...what I want to say is that we seem to have lost the middle ground. When I met Ted Koppel the first time he said that he needed a cultural interpreter. And this is exactly what this blog and the rest of the blogs in the Iraqi Blogosphere, in all its variety, has been providing. The things the reviewer saw as negatives, “irreligious, western educated, and has spent half his life outside Iraq”, are really the basis for the common things between us. You and me, we have this dialogue because of them. In a world growing apart by the day it is absolutely wonderful to find that everybody can go on about the food they like on an Iraqi blog [check out the comments] and for a moment forget all the politics. This reminds us that we *do* have things in common and not everybody is out to cut the others throat.
I do not feel ashamed of standing in the middle anymore; actually I am proud of it. The Iraqi Bloggers show that we *can* talk. You think some of us are too ungrateful and critical? Habibi at least we are talking about it, you really have not met the people who are really truly unhappy with the whole situation here.
BUT… we are still playing the [dominant/subordinate culture] game. We write in English to communicate with you, we try to establish links and reference points very much relevant to you.
The respect I have for Persian Bloggers is immense; they were able to create a dialogue among themselves which they sometimes share with the rest of the world.
One of the aims of the whole war in Iraq thing was to create “a model democratic state in the area”, I tell you it will not be Iraq because it will only be skin deep, look towards Iran for a democracy that might not be exactly what the USA wants it to be but there will be a deeper understanding of it among the people.
We share that admiration for the Iranian bloggers. But don't share you and your compatriots short, Salam. It took one seed --
Hoder -- to build what you see online from Iran. You are the seeds for Iraq. So go be fruitful and multiply blogs; it can only help.
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